


Life In Cartoon Motion

by NoContractTermination



Category: NCT (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, Childhood Friends, Coming of Age, Friends to Lovers, Happy Ending, Idiots in Love, Injury, M/M, Non-Chronological, Pining, Slow Build, Unrequited Crush
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-22
Updated: 2017-01-22
Packaged: 2018-09-19 07:36:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 31,871
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9426917
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NoContractTermination/pseuds/NoContractTermination
Summary: Yuta has been begging Taeil to join the cheerleading team with him for years. One day out of the blue, Taeil agrees.





	

**Author's Note:**

> \- The endgame is Yuta/Taeil. Just wanted to note this upfront so that anyone coming in here looking for Yutae or 2tae knows what to expect.
> 
> \- All the scenes from Taeil/Taeyong's point of view are in the present, and all the scenes from Yuta's point of view happened in the past. I tried to make it obvious but I'll note here just in case.
> 
> \- Scene changes are denoted by one dash (—), while point of view changes are denoted by two lines of triple dash:  
> — — —  
> — — —
> 
> \- Enjoy!

Taeil had nodes.

They hit him like a train failing to break at the stop, derailing into the platform and collapsing the roof of the station. They hit him like waves crashing against the shore, soaking and forceful and thorough. They hit him hard enough that he didn't talk to his mom the whole ride home from his physician's office, and he ignored his family for the rest of the weekend, and he would’ve texted Yuta, but Yuta could be a real moron at times like these, so Taeil followed his better judgment and decided against it. He woke up to almost 30 notifications on Monday morning when he finally checked his phone again, all from Yuta, all some variation of _Are you dead?? Are they gonna bring me in as a suspect?? If I don’t plead guilty will I be an accomplice to murder????_

From: Taeil  
To: Yuta  
6:47AM: I dont think it works that way dumbass

From: Yuta  
To: Taeil  
6:47AM: OH MY GOD

From: Yuta  
To: Taeil  
6:47AM: YOURE ALIVE

From: Yuta  
To: Taeil  
6:48AM: U HAD ME WORRIED!!!!!!!

From: Taeil  
To: Yuta  
6:50AM: about whether or not youre spending the rest of ur life in jail???

From: Yuta  
To: Taeil  
6:51AM: I’M COMING OVER OPEN THE WINDOW

Taeil knew better than to protest at that point, though he was in the middle of composing a list of reasons why it was a horrible idea for Yuta to climb in through Taeil’s bedroom window at 7am on the first day of their senior year of high school when he heard an impatient knock at the glass. Taeil was still in his fleece pajamas with his eyes puffy from a few days ago because he may or may not have been crying, but he rolled his eyes and opened the window anyway— Yuta was frighteningly manipulative, especially when Taeil didn’t have the energy to argue with him. 

"We have school," Taeil mumbled as he fumbled to take down the screen, careful to let his bangs obscure his red eyes. They’d been doing this since they were kids, and the tree outside Taeil’s window was beginning to look dangerously small compared to how it used to stand all broad and imposing when Yuta first moved in and a 7-year-old Taeil peeked out the window one morning to find a young, brown-haired kid perched on his windowsill with a curious expression on his face. Yuta, as usual, was rocking precariously back and forth on the balls of his feet without a care in the world, eyes bright as if Taeil were the greatest thing he’d seen in his life. 

"When has that ever stopped us before," Yuta said. He squeezed in the narrow opening Taeil left for him and fell inelegantly on the hardwood floor. His parents had stopped caring about Yuta’s unannounced entrances since the end of middle school. "Anyway, this is your fault."

"How is it my fault?" Taeil said, his voice breaking as he tried to speak louder. Yuta tilted his head inquisitively, and Taeil turned away, embarrassed. 

"You haven’t been replying to any of my texts!" Yuta complained.

"Well guess what, you’re not the only person in the universe," Taeil snapped, and Yuta frowned. He sat on Taeil’s bed, crossing his legs on top of the comforter, curling his toes in and out and watching Taeil with a hard to read expression.

"Okay," Yuta said softly after a while, and sometimes even when Taeil was incredibly exasperated with the kid, there was a nagging obligation to be grateful for his presence. Emotions weren’t Taeil’s strong suit, and that included both expressing and tolerating them. It was easier staying low key for as long as possible until everything flooded out at once like a popped balloon. Maybe he liked Yuta so much because Yuta made sure Taeil never had to deal with the consequences. "What’s up?"

Taeil sighed, sliding his hands over his uniform pants. He’d forgotten to ask his mom to iron them, but he couldn’t do anything about it now. "I have nodes," he said quietly.

"Cool," Yuta said, frustratingly cheerful for 7am. "What’s that?"

Taeil managed a short smile as he changed into the white button-down shirt. It was the first time he’d smiled since Friday. "Vocal nodules," he explained, "are little bumps on your vocal cords. A lot of singers get them but they’re different for everyone. Basically, I can’t sing. For a while."

"Oh," said Yuta, and when Taeil turned around he was still watching him. "Not cool."

"It sucks because it’s senior year, and I was going to organize the a capella group and run for president of choir, and it was already pretty much decided at the end of last year, and—"

"Yeah, I know," Yuta said. "I’m not _that_ stupid."

Taeil coughed back a snort. Yuta always seemed to know when to rudely interrupt him, because if he’d let Taeil continue, Taeil would most definitely have burst into tears. "You sure about that?"

Yuta made a discontented noise and jumped off the bed with a surprising amount of spring, landing on his toes and collapsing on Taeil’s back as Taeil struggled to hop into his pants. Yuta smoothed Taeil’s shirt down lightly and started making chopping motions into Taeil's back with enough force to make Taeil let out a small "oof". The heat of Yuta’s grin seeped into Taeil’s shoulder, radiant rows of perfect teeth, shining like little Christmas ornaments in a dim pink strip of sunlight. "How about joining the cheerleading team with me this year then?"

"Not this again," Taeil groaned, shrugging Yuta off, and Yuta laughed.

"It was worth a shot."

They’d been at it since high school. Yuta knew Taeil didn’t have a single drop of athletic inclination in his entire bloodstream, and Taeil knew Yuta would keep asking. So he let him, each year firmly declining in that mild way he did. Taeil had been a bit wishy-washy about it the first year, and in a fit of misunderstanding, Yuta scolded him for not showing up for practice while Taeil had spent the afternoon auditioning for a jazz ensemble their high school had organized just that year. And then Taeil learned to be firm with Yuta, who could take any wiggle room and make something big and disorganized and entirely unnecessary out of it. Yuta had an intoxicating imagination that was both a gift and a curse. 

"Give it a thought, though, yeah?" said Yuta. "I'm serious."

Taeil grumbled incoherently. Yuta knew how to get him; Yuta knew he had trouble saying no to people, and Yuta also, for whatever reason, loved training him to do the things that scared him. So to Yuta, it was a win-win situation. "Why did you keep asking all these years?" Taeil said.

The road to school was sunny and lit with morning dew. Between the two of them Taeil had a harder time getting up in the morning, but he didn't get much sleep last night anyway. "Oh, come on," Yuta said, punching Taeil's shoulder lightly. "Don't talk like high school's over already."

It already felt over, though— with high school acapella dreams dashed, there wasn't much to look forward to at the end of the day (rather, it seemed productive to avoid the choir department entirely). Not to mention an impending surgery that could change the tone of his voice forever. The upcoming year was mapping out be a burden if anything; fast-forwarding through the whole thing on auto-pilot sounded mighty appealing. 

Yuta frowned at Taeil's silence. "To tell you the truth, I just wanted to hang out with you more at first," he said, locking his hands behind his head and staring up at the sky. "We were going from middle school to high school, things were changing. It was scary."

You don't have to worry about me going anywhere, was what Taeil wanted to say, but instead he pointed out, "We hang out every day."

After some silence and kicking around a rock in the road, Yuta mumbled, "Didn't want to lose you." 

It must've been hard for Yuta to admit because he still wouldn't meet Taeil's gaze. Yuta was sometimes unpredictable, and Taeil never knew how to respond in those moments. Responding normally was difficult enough. Communication was never _their_ strong suit, but something still drew them to each other time and again. Despite feeling at a loss for words multiple times in every conversation they had, there still wasn’t any of that underlying anxiety toward strangers that was so repelling. After all, Yuta never judged him for not having much to say. "And what about the year after that?" Taeil said, giving up on getting Yuta to look his way. He turned back toward the familiar path.

"Wanted to introduce you to all my new friends," Yuta said, brightening a little. It was at least easy enough to tell that Yuta didn't like those uncomfortable topics. 

Taeil laughed. "You know I don't hang out with those types."

"You'll like them, I swear," Yuta said with a wink, and Taeil stuck his tongue out at him. 

"I’m. Not. Joining."

"Whatever you say," Yuta sang. They both looked forward at the same time, scanning for anything new on the beaten path since last semester ended. There wasn’t much— that old driveway finally finished construction, and someone was in the middle of tearing up their garden. Yuta sighed. "Junior year, I dunno, I guess I thought you'd just be a good addition to the team."

Something changed then. Even the way Yuta talked about it was different, how he focused on objectives rather than on relationships— how his speech centered around others rather than himself. Yuta didn’t know he changed, which was what made it so jarring, and pointing it out to him just seemed unnecessarily cruel, because Yuta hated being unsure of himself. It was the first summer Yuta trained with the team full time, and Taeil didn’t like bringing it up, mostly because he was scared of what Yuta’s response might be. People were bound to change after a while, and who was Taeil to hold Yuta back? It wasn’t even anything concrete or discernible about him that felt different; it wasn’t something Taeil had the ability to put into words. So he buried it and moved on with his life in that comfortable way he did, not bothering with the fancy concept of engaging in dialogue or healthy conversation.

"Still think you would be, though. That hasn't changed," continued Yuta. "Those guys aren’t so bad. They’re a diverse bunch. It’ll be good for you."

Taeil rolled his eyes and made a displeased sound. "What are you, my mom?"

"M’just saying," said Yuta with a bit of a miffed bite. 

The school approached them from around the bend as they walked the rest of the way in silence, Taeil purposely mismatching Yuta’s step and stumbling when they reached the threshold. They parted ways at the gate as usual— Yuta always made a beeline for the path of least resistance, heading straight for his class. Yuta did things like that, leaving Taeil watching his back and wanting more of him and not really knowing why. 

Lee Taeyong, as imposing and dark as ever, propped the door open with his foot as Taeil approached their homeroom, and Taeil yawned to avoid eye contact. There were plenty of people other than Yuta who were familiar just from sharing a homeroom for the past three years, and sometimes they gained or lost a few, but the rest of them never really strayed far from the class 3-A atmosphere. If the Yuta-and-Taeil corner of the neighborhood were home base, then class 3-A would be the dugout, the place where you talked and observed and learned all the things you had to know to perform out in the field. And although people like Lee Taeyong and that skinny boned Kim Doyoung weren’t really Taeil's _friends_ , they were familiar faces that showed up reliably every day, like trees in a yard or heavy pieces of furniture that you never cleaned under. 

Taeyong sat behind him and had an unlikely friendship going with Doyoung, so Taeil drowned them out as the day went by about as well as expected. That is, until Donghyuk popped into the room at lunchtime and sauntered over to Taeil’s desk in the least conspicuous way possible. Doyoung let out a snort from behind him. 

"'Sup," Donghyuk said, settling backward into the empty seat in front of Taeil so that they faced each other, and Taeil mumbled out something incoherent which about summarized his feelings toward life. After a moment of silence in which Donghyuk must’ve realized that was the best he was going to get out of Taeil then, he nodded knowingly. "Honestly, I’m same."

Taeil sighed. "What is it?" he said wearily, and Donghyuk frowned.

"I think we both know very well what it is, Mr. President of Choir who didn’t bother showing up for choir on the first day," Donghyuk replied, extra nasally, extra belittling. The weight of his discerning gaze made it feel like Taeil had murdered someone. 

Taeil crumpled up the napkin from his lunch, clenching his fist until his knuckles turned white. "Didn’t the director tell you guys? I’m not president anymore, I quit."

Donghyuk leaned forward in the chair until it was propped up against the front of Taeil’s desk. "Nuh-uh, you’re not getting away just like that," he said, frowning up at Taeil from directly under his chin.

"Why do you care," Taeil said bitterly, and Donghyuk pressed his hand to his chest in mock offense.

"I’ve always cared," wailed Donghyuk, and Taeil rolled his eyes. Donghyuk was throwing about eleven persuasion tactics at him in rapid succession, and it was working. He nudged Taeil’s shoulder lightheartedly for good measure. "Come on, this isn’t the Taeil I know."

Taeil flattened out his napkin and stared at it, suddenly interested in the little grease marks his fingers left behind. There wasn’t much constructive to say. "I don’t want to talk about it, okay?"

That seemed to appease Donghyuk for about 30 seconds, or at least confuse him enough to make him think for a hot minute while Taeil chewed sourly on his lunch. Donghyuk hummed. "But talking it out for once might be good, you know?"

Taeil tried to scoff, but it came out as a condescending choking noise. "Not when you have nodes." 

Donghyuk didn’t seem surprised. "So that’s what it is," he said airily, stretching out his arms and legs as if having just completed some epic feat. "Director told the officers but not the rest of us." For as irritating as Donghyuk was sometimes, he put up with a lot. He’d grown from the chubby little shit that tagged along to Taeil’s parents’ house parties and ran around the house touching everything with his grubby hands to an only sometimes shitty young man who did okay on tests and sang a _wicked_ tenor alongside Taeil. "You know, you could’ve said something, like a speech or something," Donghyuk added. "Like, you could’ve been a hero. A martyr."

"You know I’m not that kind of person," said Taeil, and Donghyuk nodded.

"True, I know you’re allergic to public speaking." 

Taeil rolled his eyes but let out a little smile anyway, and Donghyuk brightened up with a huff. Despite Donghyuk’s mischievous demeanor, his deepest intentions were almost always good, and it seemed like he’d arrived with the goal of cheering Taeil up. Why was it that Taeil could simultaneously not want to be bothered and yet still react to human interaction so warmly? How was it that being around Donghyuk, Yuta— even being silent in the presence of a group felt so calming, yet when prompted to actually converse, Taeil’s words came out all jumbled and wrong?

"You gotta do _something_ ," said Donghyuk. "If you’re not gonna be in choir anymore."

"I think I’m busy enough as it is, with college applications coming up," Taeil replied coolly. Extracurriculars were usually mandatory, but he could probably talk his choir director into whipping up some sort of waiver with the amount of work he put in as secretary last year.

"No, but that’s exactly why you have to do something! Otherwise you’ll just hole yourself up in your room all day."

"That’s not—" Taeil started, but it was too true for him to bother contesting, and Donghyuk knew it.

"Honestly, without Yuta barging in every other day, your life would just be depressing." Donghyuk took a noodle from Taeil’s lunch, and Taeil poked at him with his fork. 

"I don’t know why I’m friends with the two loudest beings on the planet."

Donghyuk beamed, snorting. "You’re a fun person is all, but more fun when you’re around people like us. Speaking of which, is Yuta still bothering you about the cheer team? Is that still a Thing?"

Taeil groaned. "Please don’t—"

"Well, it should be a Thing. I heard they’re doing pretty well. They’re, like, personally recruiting you for their elite team."

"There’s no way I’m good enough," said Taeil. "I’d rather not break all my bones and my dignity at the same time, thanks."

"But everyone’s there to catch you!" Donghyuk pointed out. "You’ve been in choir, you know how teamwork… works."

Taeil didn’t really have what he’d call trust issues, but trust was earned, and it was annoying to have to keep reminding people about that. 

The bell rang conveniently, startling him a bit out of his seat. "You’re going to be late for class if you don’t go back soon," Doyoung piped up from behind them.

Donghyuk stuck his tongue out. "Mind your own business, twinkle toes."

Taeil almost spit his food all over his desk, and Taeyong let out a bark of a laugh. "Kid’s got a bite," Taeyong said, and leave it to Donghyuk to be the one who initiated Taeil’s first conversation of the year with the infamous Lee Taeyong, who was— on top of being Taeil’s longtime classmate— the local anomaly and captain of the cheerleading team, and rumor had it he turned down hundreds of modeling gigs out of sheer laziness. Oh, and Yuta had an enormous crush on the kid, though for someone so straightforward and demanding, Yuta had been pretty good at hiding it so far. 

Doyoung rolled his eyes. "I can take it— I’m used to it, after all."

Taeyong only waggled his eyebrows, which were fluffy like caterpillars.

"Anyway, I gotta go, apparently," Donghyuk said, patting Taeil’s shoulder like he was his mentor instead of a cocky underclassman. "Think about it, yeah?"

And Taeil must’ve just had a knack for attracting those kinds of people, despite being the least outgoing, least entertaining person ever. Maybe most people in the world were just positive and energetic like that, and they needed someone like Taeil to balance them out. Either way, he at least owed it to Yuta wait for him until practice ended after their little quarrel this morning, since Yuta was in the starting formation and co-captain this year, and Taeil wasn’t _completely_ dense. He’d learned some things over the years through observation and fumbled practice— how, vaguely, to imitate a person, which involved voicing what you were thinking and doing things that might make other people happy. Fortunately, Yuta was easy to please.

The air inside the school gym was tepid and smelled like tarp and sweat. At least avoiding the rest of the choir for the rest of the day hadn’t been too difficult, especially since Taeil darted toward the gym as soon as class was dismissed, which was generally a place choir students avoided. Yuta was on the far side of the gym in a t-shirt and sweats, clapping his hands and talking animatedly to Taeyong as the rest of the team trickled out of the changing room.

They looked like a neighborhood dance crew, a variety of ages and sizes, a few incredibly tall and one or two nearly as short as Taeil, some built and others lanky. The echoes in the gym made it hard to understand what they were saying, but they acted more or less like how a bunch of Yutas would act, excited and silly, emotionally expressive during stretches, shouting out things during Taeyong’s pep talk, laughing when Yuta and Hansol tried to wrangle them all up.

Although there were a few groups of students sitting in the bleachers working on homework or listening to music, Taeyong glanced curiously at Taeil a few times, his gaze piercing right through the murky film of light over the gym and locking on Taeil. You could almost see his face light up with recognition on the third glance, and Taeyong _was_ incredibly handsome, especially all concentrated on his routines like that. Taeil burned inwardly at being the object that broke Taeyong’s concentration, though Taeyong never once turned to Yuta and pointed Taeil out, and Yuta didn’t bother looking his way. 

If Yuta hadn’t confided in Taeil, he probably wouldn’t have picked up on the whole crush thing. Maybe that was what changed last summer— the timeline made sense; spring was around when Yuta and his family had been drinking that one time for _Seolnal_ and Taeil was staying over while his parents visited extended family. Barring all impossibilities, Yuta got even more talkative when he was tipsy. The Taeyong Thing was made known that night, and Yuta never asked Taeil for anything since then, even though he knew Taeil was in Taeyong’s class. It was Hansol before, who seemed wholesome enough, but honestly Taeyong was a more interesting person. Which brought Taeil to another point of contention stopping him from joining the cheer team: Lee Taeyong was a slippery slope, and it was way too easy to see himself falling down it.

— — —   
— — — 

The oak tree was ruddy and complicated, like Tokyo Tower, which Yuta only saw once in a while anyway, choppy and uneven against the horizon. The branches sticking out of its trunk were like monkey bars, the perfect size for grabbing. There were still hundreds of boxes left to unpack, but no way was he getting involved in that trainwreck. Besides, this tree was officially _his_ , and he had to stake his claim. Because it definitely wouldn’t be fair if the old, infuriatingly beige country ranch next door got possession of such a magnificent tree, especially if they weren't even going to use it, leaving it to wither away all lonely like that. Though admittedly a next-door haunted house overgrown with an invasive, needy oak tree would be pretty cool. It'd make one heck of a story, too.

Yuta surveyed the distance from the tips of his fingers to the closest branch. Okay, he'd definitely need a stool next time, but for now his bike would do, if he propped it up against the trunk and stood on the seat and the handlebars.

Nothing beat the feeling of your hands closing around something sturdy and strong, like Dad’s finger or that fire pole he used to slide down in his old elementary school playground. The bark was rough against his legs— hopefully that was just ivy and not poison oak— and with each successive branch, his arms complained in response with the familiar soreness of exam day in phys-ed class when Yuta did one too many pull-ups. 

There were only a few levels until you could _juuust_ see inside the upstairs bedroom next door, which piqued Yuta’s latent curiosity. Through the sheer white curtains was a boy about his age, sitting on the floor with his back propped against his bed, a book in his lap. His room looked plain like a glob of vanilla pudding, and his cable-knit sweater was too thick for the late spring warmth, ribbed with white braids all the way down to the too-big basketball shorts he wore underneath.

And then, when Yuta looked back up, the boy was watching him.

"Please get down from there," he said, staring at Yuta blankly.

"No?" replied Yuta, leaning dangerously close to the boy’s house, muffling his voice against the windowsill. 

The boy sighed and mumbled something, and then he got up and padded across the room. "Then come inside?" he said after opening the window with considerable effort, as if it hadn’t been touched in years. "Please?"

Yuta glanced behind him. He might be able to propel himself inside, mayhe if he pushed off that faraway branch, though he had about a 50% chance of dying. The boy seemed to understand, reaching out for Yuta. His hand was soft and dry, and Yuta held on too tight otherwise he might slip away, and they tumbled into the room together, Yuta falling face first into the boy’s stomach, soft and pudgy through the layers of his sweater.

After a moment, the boy breathed some sounds that vaguely sounded like "Moontail?" nudging Yuta’s shoulder until Yuta lifted his head to look up at him.

It took a moment to figure out that he was trying to introduce himself: Taeil. "I'm Nakamoto— Na-ka-mo-to Yu-ta," Yuta said slowly, enunciating every syllable like his parents said, and a small smile spread across Taeil's face.

He seemed to ponder for a moment, then said, "Okay Yuta."

It was thrilling, hearing his given name slip so casually from Taeil's lips— it was like giving a part of himself that he wasn't supposed to share, like passing out Valentines where on every card was a small slice of his heart. "We just moved in," Yuta explained, "from Osaka— which is in Japan," he added, flushing. 

Taeil hummed and turned back to his bed, crawling over and slumping against it with his book again. It was as if he didn’t know what to do with himself when there was another human being in his presence, so Yuta became a stuffed animal, a pile of clothing, a lamp that, if Taeil ignored for long enough, might just magically disappear.

Yuta huffed, and Taeil folded in on himself, pressing his face even further into the pages of the book until Yuta said impatiently, "Wanna play?"

—

As it turned out, Taeil was horrible. At everything. 

They spent the entire summer kicking a soccer ball back and forth until Taeil could successfully dribble up and down the length of his yard, and even that was a struggle. He stumbled over his own two feet and didn't seem to know how to move them intuitively outside of walking. His movements were small and contained, almost lazy in a way, as if he didn't want to exert any more energy than absolutely necessary. Because of this, having a ball between his feet felt unnatural, leading to many fumbles and rolled ankles (but nothing serious).

Taeil did everything Yuta said without complaint, though, which was a curious thing. He became quieter as he got tired, and he spaced out more, but otherwise showed no signs of physical exhaustion. One day they were sitting in the grass, Yuta with his legs splayed out and Taeil struggling to kick the ball in his general direction. He knocked it and it sailed into the driveway and across the street, Yuta sprinting after it reflexively like a cat chasing a mouse.

"Why are you so bad at this?" Yuta asked when he returned, slightly out of breath. It was a legitimate question— he just wanted to know. Didn't Taeil have a father, or didn't he ever join any sports teams growing up? Did he know how to jump rope or ride a bike? Yuta had never asked these questions— he didn't know much about Taeil at all. Taeil didn't offer information about himself naturally, and most of their days were spent babbling about nothing— or, Yuta babbling about nothing and Taeil offering suggestions here and there, most of which were completely nonsensical. Sometimes Yuta told him this, and other times Yuta would just say, "That's a bad idea," without really explaining why.

Taeil shrugged. "I don't know," he said redundantly, as if he really knew nothing at all. His expression was blank as usual, his sweater sleeves flopping past his fingertips.

It was frustrating. It was frustrating, but cute in a way, and Yuta couldn't say he didn't enjoy imparting knowledge onto Taeil, who was a fast and attentive learner but his body couldn't seem to keep up with his brain, which couldn't seem to keep up with his imagination. "It's okay," Yuta said, ruffling Taeil's hair. They were roughly the same height, so Yuta had to reach up. "I like teaching you."

That was when Taeil burst into tears.

It wasn't like Taeil had never shed a tear or two before, after scraping his knee or enduring a particularly hard fall. He mostly let out this vaguely pained "Ahhhhh..." and then got up again, limping around in circles like a confused puppy until he felt better. This time though, he was actually _crying_ , tears streaming from every part of his eyeballs and down his face, which was still relatively blank but red with exertion as he sniffed. 

Yuta panicked. "Don't cry," was his knee jerk reaction, and then he put his hand on Taeil's shoulder, which only made him cry harder. Taeil let out a wail of agony when Yuta hugged him. "Why?" Yuta said franticallly, patting Taeil's back. "Why are you crying?"

"I— I dont know," Taeil said between hiccups. 

"You can't just say that for everything, you know!" Yuta said with a nervous chuckle, holding Taeil at arm's length. Taeil was looking down, rubbing his nose with a small finger poking out from inside his sleeve.

"You're just— so nice," Taeil blubbered.

"What?" Yuta said, flashing his teeth as he beamed inwardly. It felt nice to hear, even if Taeil was crying and there was snot all over his shirt and everything was a general mess. 

As Taeil got over another bout of half-hyperventilation, he explained, "I sometimes feel like crying when people are really nice to me."

What horrible things did he have to endure inside those beige country doors?! Did his parents beat him? Or call him names? Did they lock him in his room and forget to feed him for days at a time? Yuta suddenly rushed to recall every detail of Taeil's bedroom, which to his memory seemed passably normal, but they must've hidden the evidence— they always did. Parents were so good at that kind of thing.

"I don't know why," Taeil added quickly. "It's not what you think, I promise."

Yuta squinted. "Are you sure? You can always come stay at my house, you know."

Taeil laughed through the last bit of his tears, which made his eyebrows drop down all sad-like, and it really was cute how pitiful he looked. "You're so easy to predict, Yuta," he said out of the blue. "My parents are nice to me. I do well in school, and they love me. I don't know why this happens. I’m not good at emotions."

"You mean you’re not good _with_ emotions?" Yuta offered, and Taeil stood there, rubbing his chin a little, making him look suddenly much older than he appeared.

"I’m not good at emotions," he repeated. "I mean, I’m not good with them either. I’m not. Emotions."

"Okay," said Yuta, and Taeil laughed, his mouth wide open and his voice twinkling. "We can practice," Yuta suggested, because that was what you did when you weren’t good at something. That was how Yuta learned Korean, and soccer, and math, and tumbling. Although emotions seemed like a natural sort of thing, but maybe Taeil just didn’t practice enough. "Though I guess there’s nothing _wrong_ with the way you do emotions."

Taeil nodded, sniffing a little, grinning at Yuta’s sentence construction.

"People might just get weirded out, you know. If you just start crying," Yuta continued, thinking aloud. 

"It’s okay," Taeil said softly. "I don’t like people very much."

"But you like me," Yuta pointed out quickly. 

Taeil fidgeted awkwardly, fumbling for a response. "You’re—you’re different."

Yuta hummed. "I think I’m like most people." Taeil frowned in response, clearly uncomfortable, and Yuta laughed, patting his back lightly. "I think you would like people if you hung out with them more." He then added, "And people would like you."

Taeil’s eyes brightened a little at that. "But you’re enough?" Taeil said hesitantly, as if he wasn’t quite sure what he wanted to convey.

Yuta beamed, his chest swelling. "Okay, one step at a time," he agreed. It was weird, not being surrounded by people. Back in Osaka, he was constantly the center of attention, and he’d just grown so used to it that there was no point in considering any other way of life. But while teaching and nurturing and exploring and discovering Moon Taeil, Yuta had never once felt the need for another person in his life. Friendship with Taeil was as perplexing and stimulating as the shallow company of hundreds of other acquaintances. It was like discovering the other side of a coin that had been glued to the sidewalk all along, and every day was beautiful and new, and there wasn’t much more Yuta wanted in life than that.

— — —   
— — — 

"You know I’m not athletic," Taeil said, folding his legs onto the bench and playing with the rings of his spiral notebook. Only after practice ended had Yuta noticed him while jogging toward the changing rooms. The way he brightened up was comical and so very Yuta-like, jumping over the rail and running up the stairs toward where Taeil was sitting. And as usual, Taeil blubbered his way through an excuse for why he’d come to Yuta’s practice while neither apologizing for that morning nor expressing any interest in joining the team. Yuta, of course, took everything the wrong way.

Yuta tsked and leaned back, huffing out a dramatic breath. "You know athleticism has nothing to do with how you’re _born_ , it’s just hard work and stuff. And I know you can work hard, I’ve seen it." Yuta ruffled Taeil’s hair, and Taeil swatted his hand away. "Hell, you’d be singing right now if your throat weren’t a mess from— what’s that? _Overwork_?"

Taeil glared at Yuta, who noticed and plastered an annoyingly flawless smile on the bottom half of his face, teeth shining and arranged like rows of new books. "Do I look particularly convincible today?" Taeil grumbled.

" _No_ ," Yuta whined. He shifted uncomfortably in his seat, glancing anywhere but at Taeil and looking out over the gym floor, where some of the underclassmen were stacking the mats. "We’re just, uh," he said, clearing his throat. Taeil glanced at Yuta expectantly, but Yuta pursed his lips back and forth, chin tight with a stressed frown. If there was one thing Yuta wasn’t good at, it was asking for help— admitting his faults and talking seriously about it. And as fun as watching such a pretty human being squirm should’ve been, it was pitiful in a way, too, especially with the context that Taeil had been rejecting Yuta’s offers to join the cheerleading team since the beginning of high school. "We’re down a pretty important member of the team," Yuta finally said, exasperated and still half-jokingly, as if it were all a complicated ploy for Taeil’s pity.

Taeil snorted. "Yeah, tell that to the choir."

"Come _on_ ," Yuta said, frowning, and there was usually a continuation to that, but Yuta stayed uncharacteristically silent long enough to draw Taeil’s gaze to him again. Yuta had been growing his fringe out lately, the summer bob slowly morphing into a smooth stroke of brown carelessly swept to one side or brushed up over his head and steadily drifting back over his face as he talked. It was fun to look at if not a little distracting, the way it would start gathering in a clump that rested against his cheekbone and covered more and more of his eyes until he sighed and brushed it back with his hand yet again. Yuta had always been an expressive person, but with his eyebrows and forehead freed again, his face fell open like a road map. And currently, the map read _SAD_ in bold letters superimposed over all the street names and rivers and other intricacies that were Nakamoto Yuta. Not long afterward, Taeil felt his face falling to reflect Yuta’s. "I’m co-captain this year, okay?" Yuta said softly. "And I want this season to be really good and perfect, I want to go to nationals and prove that we can do it, and all the people from our grade who’ve been training since freshman year are finally at the level where we could totally do it, and we have a transfer student who’s a really good flyer, too!"

Watching Yuta get himself excited over seemingly insignificant things was one of life’s simple pleasures. It was stupid, and yet it was a lifeline, keeping Taeil afloat as he drifted through the ocean of high school. "Okay, so what’s the issue?" said Taeil.

Yuta rubbed the back of his head, his expression landing somewhere between embarrassed and frustrated. "The new kid, he’s. He’s, uh, afraid of heights."

—

Taeil mulled it over for a few hours. It was honestly both embarrassing and surprising that he was giving it this much thought in the first place, but there wasn’t anyone to impress anymore— no one holding onto his own pride except for himself.

Yuta had introduced him to the new flyer-afraid-of-heights— Ten, from Thailand, who was sharp and witty and trained as a dancer and incredibly athletic, basically Taeil’s polar opposite, if he were important enough to have one. But Ten was also kind and seemed like a positive influence, and he enthusiastically showed Taeil some stunts they’d be practicing together as if Taeil’s tone or body language had somehow expressed even remote interest in joining (it hadn’t). Yuta, all the while, seemed like an overgrown child eager for Taeil’s approval, which, for all intents and purposes, he could drag out of Taeil’s cold, dead body. After Taeil inevitably fucked up a somersault in like the next two days or something and snapped his neck and died.

Of all the overload of sensory stimulation today, what Donghyuk said at lunchtime ended up standing out the most. Taeil’s life was pretty fucking depressing. Sometimes he was numb to it, like a bystander just watching his own life pass by. But with the whole vocal nodes incident happening on the brink of what could’ve been his best school year to date, it was starting to feel like something out of a movie with the absolute worst timing possible and all the problems coming down on him at once like a sorry excuse for a 90s sitcom but every time they played the laugh track it got faster. 

The thing was, during the summer Yuta was gone at training camp, Taeil had gotten his first glimpse at Life Without Yuta, a life he’d never really known. It’d become a possibility, a small blip in the corner of his field of vision, when Yuta quit choir to join cheer, but the more time Yuta spent at practice the more often he barged into Taeil’s room at odd hours of the evening complaining about sore muscles or someone accidentally kicked Hansol in the face or Johnny called him stupid (and okay, maybe he was stupid but "me, stupid? That's a riot, coming from _Johnny_!"). So not much changed besides the topic of their conversations becoming more interesting like that Taeyong who sat in the back of the class or how Yuta’s crush on Hansol was Officially Over because Hansol didn’t wear slippers in the locker room shower. That summer sleep-away training camp only lasted a week, but Taeil’s room felt oddly empty, his oak tree oddly light, his window oddly still. He’d kept looking over subconsciously whenever there was a noise at the window. Would Yuta have been offended if Taeil told him there was a squirrel that kept coming by that oddly resembled him? Maybe if Taeil kept the _it kept getting my hopes up_ part to himself. 

It was never a real possibility that Yuta might stop visiting or one day just stop talking to him all together. The only way to temper the fear was to convince himself that he’d be fine, that Yuta was just a peripheral, some unnecessary supplementary material in his life. Yuta had other friends, and Taeil had… solitude.

Okay, so maybe it was time to distance himself from Yuta a bit. Taeil mulled _this_ over as well.

He could make other friends. That was a Thing. But by their final year of high school, people had already begun falling into comfortable routines, the spreads of people like controls on a plane, while your established friend group was the autopilot function. And sometimes you had to help your friend cheat on a test, or go out to that party and drink with them, or try a smoke or two, but sometimes the familiar was still more comfortable, no matter how unpleasant or morally distressing it felt. Sometimes you just had to follow what was already laid out for you. And maybe life just liked hitting Taeil with these giant bricks of irony, or maybe someone decided to switch his life to extra-hard mode, just his, because the only way to distance himself from Yuta was to make more friends. He’d have to probably get closer to Yuta first. And join that godforsaken cheer team. 

— — —   
— — — 

There was a time when he thought it just came with the territory, realizing you were gay, or bisexual, or at least queer of some sort, and suddenly finding all your mildly attractive friends like 20 times more attractive. It didn’t help that Yuta was approaching puberty, and the world decided it would be a great idea to double the potential dating pool, making Yuta jittery and nervous and incredibly wide-eyed, amazed at beauty in all the places he’d never considered before.

He was a sexual minority, and that was okay. Well, it wasn’t okay until it was, when Yuta was wandering around the library after school and heard some murmuring from the back corner. When he went to investigate, he saw a blur of movements— hidden expertly under the shadows, fabric against fabric, fingers on skin; two girls from his grade, one crowding the other against the back wall under the fire alarm. Yuta only had time to catch a chaste kiss between them and her fingertips sinking into the plush skin of her partner’s thigh before he slipped out of view, heart pounding in his ribcage.

It was hot, sure, but there was something about it— a forbidden beauty— that was both pure and bittersweet. There weren’t any other words (yet) to describe it. It was kind of okay when his homeroom teacher handed out a flier one morning, grumbling, "This group doesn’t need any more publicity, but the principal says I have to, so." 

There was a very pretty individual jumping out of the page. They were recruiting for the high school boys’ cheer team. High school wouldn’t come for another two years, but any amount of time was worth waiting to feast his eyes upon an individual like that in the flesh. 

A hushed murmur coursed through the room. "It’s Ji Hansol," someone was saying. Yuta listened on instead of interrupting, because looking too enthusiastic was Not Cool, and this was uncharted territory, the unfamiliar feeling of wanting something and not having it delivered to you on a silver platter. Yuta wasn’t spoiled, but he’d never before wanted anything out of reach. Taeil, soccer, family— that was all life needed, really. Give him a game and he could win it. If it was raining, it might be sunny tomorrow. In the dead of winter, at least there was no fear of being too warm, and in the long, sweltering days of summer, at least he wasn’t too cold. Life was pretty good. So when Hansol came along, it was thrilling to feel him graze the tips of Yuta’s fingers but remain just out of reach, a tall shadowy figure in the hall or a collection of dots and lines on a sheet of paper. 

Apparently this Hansol individual was some kind of gymnastics hotshot who’d smuggled his way onto the cheer team through charisma and hard work and good behavior, which were three things that Yuta could very well do too with the right motivation. Hansol didn’t talk much and avoided crowds, so all the information Yuta gathered was through proxy (and put his still-budding Korean language skills to the test). He also may or may have gotten a pretty good story going that he was looking for Ji Hansol, his newly acquired Korean tutor.

"Isn’t he incredible?" Yuta said excitedly to Taeil, whom he met with regularly at the gates after school. They walked home together every day, chatting about nothing in particular or sometimes just staring into the wind.

Taeil smiled beside him, humming in agreement. Yuta’s heart fluttered at the soft sound and the way Taeil’s lips curled up at the ends. "You might have to, you know, meet him first, though," Taeil mused, and Yuta kicked his foot. 

"I’m not saying I need to be _friends_ with him or anything, I just think it’s admirable," said Yuta. It was complicated, confiding in Taeil. It always seemed like he knew something you didn’t, but he didn’t really know what he knew, so he couldn't tell you even if he wanted to. He was simultaneously expressive and hard to read— he gave appropriate responses but they were always just the slightest bit unsatisfying. Yuta did most of the talking, but Taeil didn’t seem to mind. Or, if he did mind, five years was a long time to put up with such a one-sided dynamic. But they stuck to light topics, not that there was much heavy to talk about at a time in one’s life such as middle school. 

One thing Yuta hated was seeing Taeil cry. Which was one reason not to steer their topics of conversation into the emotional territory. Taeil cried easily and for mundane reasons, and it was uncomfortable and stressful; it was like some invisible pedestal under Taeil was breaking down even though Yuta tried so hard to keep it up. No one was perfect, but Yuta wanted Taeil to be, and when he cried, it made Yuta want to squeeze him until he could barely breathe. 

Taeil swung his feet back and forth. "It’s okay if you want to be friends with him, though," Taeil said. "I don’t mind."

"I know you don’t," said Yuta, and Taeil smiled a little brighter, as if pleased Yuta knew what he was going to say. 

The gayness. It was complicated. It was hard to say out loud— _I’m gay_ , or bisexual, or pansexual, or queer. Saying it out loud meant it was true, it was forever. You could never take back the things you’ve set free into the air.

Taeil was a little taller than Yuta in their underdeveloped, 13-year-old bodies, but he was never imposing. Maybe because they'd spent enough time together by then that it was pretty obvious Taeil couldn't hurt a fly, and he was the type to keep his distance, to never lean too far over you when you talked or to never give one of those annoyingly tight, hearty handshakes. They stood next to each other in choir, where Taeil's voice was clear in a way that he never showed outside of that class, and it rang out over the auditorium like sunlight across an empty field. Taeil wasn’t strong or tall or handsome, but he was perfect, and maybe that was why Yuta had a little crush on him. There just came a time in one’s pansexual existence when you realized all your friends were suddenly dating material. The feeling of your heart fluttering whenever they smiled, or wanting to lure out that smile again and again, maybe those were just things Taeil did to people— Yuta wouldn’t have known, because they were each other’s only friends up until now. 

So maybe that was just Moon Taeil, or maybe Yuta had a little crush on him, but it didn’t really matter because they had forever to figure it out. "I’m gonna join the cheerleading team," Yuta said suddenly, determined.

"Good," said Taeil, seeming genuinely happy for him.

"You should join, too," Yuta said.

Taeil laughed. "Remember when we were little? I suck at sports."

"Oh, come on," said Yuta. "It’s like 10% talent and 90% hard work. You could do it if you tried."

"You have too much faith in me," Taeil replied. He looked down at the ground between his knees. "And besides, I have choir."

That, Yuta had to respect. There were some things that had to go unsaid— Taeil probably knew Yuta would have to quit choir to join cheer, but Taeil didn’t say anything, and Yuta scowled at the uncomfortable pause. Taeil’s silence made it suddenly gloomy, like a rift had opened between them, small as a crack in the sidewalk that would be easy enough to ignore, except they both knew it was growing and couldn’t be stopped. It wasn’t like Yuta was choosing between Hansol and Taeil, and nothing Taeil had said even remotely implied that, so when did things get so unnecessarily difficult, and why did it make Yuta feel so _angry_ all of a sudden?

"I’m just gonna try it out for a year and see how it goes," Yuta announced.

"Cool," said Taeil, and Yuta frowned. Taeil could at least _try_ to resist him. Didn’t he want to keep Yuta? Wasn’t Yuta important to him at all?

"Don’t be like this, Taeil," said Yuta, and Taeil looked up at him.

"Like what?"

Yuta thought about it for a moment, clenching his hands into little tense fists. "I don’t _know_ , just— just like this."

Taeil looked down again though his gaze darted back and forth across the pavement like a confused spotlight, and he rubbed his palms on his knees anxiously.

"Can’t you say something?" tried Yuta again, but his voice came out a lot sharper than he intended. He slapped his hand over his mouth in a wave of instant regret, but Taeil was too focused on…whatever it was he was focusing on, to notice. Yuta would later learn that Taeil tended to escape into the safety of his own mind during times like those, but at thirteen, Yuta was needy and confused. And he didn’t know how to express it.

"I’m sorry," said Taeil, his voice shaking. _Sorry I’m not enough for you_ , or _Sorry I’m not as perfect as you thought_ , or _Sorry I’m perfect, but I’m_ still _not enough_ — it could’ve been any of them. 

This wasn’t the first time Yuta had made Taeil cry. That would be back when they first met, when Taeil cried in response to Yuta’s kindness. And it probably wouldn’t be the last, either. Yuta had experienced a whole range of emotions during the times Taeil cried— panic, frustration, anxiety— but this was the first time he felt genuinely, undividedly guilty. Like it was his fault, and there was nowhere else to put the blame, and— well, blame was surprisingly heavy, heavier than your legs when you’d been running for three hours, heavier than the big sacks of rice at the store, heavier than the rain during those typhoons that hit Japan every few years, drenching the islands with flooding and traffic and power outages. 

They went back to normal the next day as kids (yes, even middle schoolers) were apt to do. But that was markedly the first day of the After; there was the Before Cheer Happened and the After Cheer Happened that separated the great span of time that was Yuta’s thirteen year old life. But cheer was just the palpable, concrete thing that Yuta could blame, the figurehead that symbolized a great many things that weren’t so apparent, that functioned in the background as Yuta kept his mind and eyes focused indefinitely forward.

— — —   
— — — 

"Don’t take this the wrong way," Taeil grumbled while Yuta grabbed his hands and dragged him toward the gym with a bounce in his step so gleeful that he was almost _skipping_. 

"I know you love me," sang Yuta, pushing haphazardly through crowds of underclassmen and darting through the halls while Taeil mumbled out halfhearted apologies. 

He’d asked Yuta to meet him in his classroom after school because breaking the news in public seemed like a horrible idea, but Yuta managed to make it into some big deal anyway, squeezing Taeil in a hug so tight he was pretty sure Yuta wrung out three years off his lifespan. 

"Guys!" Yuta yelled, slamming the door of the changing room open with a surprising amount of strength. Maybe all those years of training actually paid off after all.

Taeyong was the first to poke his head out from behind the lockers, shirtless with his collarbones sticking out. When Taeyong wasn’t around (or was sleeping in the back of the classroom) it was a lot easier to forget about him, but when he appeared right in front of you like that with his messy eyebrows and squared-off shoulders, he commanded the attention of the entire room, which was suddenly way too warm. How had Yuta tolerated it for the past three years, being in this guy’s unshakable presence?

"Told you I’d get us a new member," Yuta said, grinning at Taeyong like a child waiting for praise. 

"I never doubted you, though," replied Taeyong, but the spark in his eyes and the pretty upward curl of his lip spoke volumes and made Taeil’s heart flutter in all the wrong ways. 

As uncomfortable as being in "love" was, half of it was because it was unfamiliar to Taeil. For a while during middle school, he’d wondered if there were something wrong with him, especially when he started noticing Yuta staring at pretty girls or boys, or when the boys in his class talked about actresses and singers they found attractive. When the word _attractive_ was mentioned, Taeil’s first thought was Yuta, but then again, Yuta was the only person he’d ever known, like _really_ known, deeper than just a passing glance or an acted out character in a show or a movie. Taeil wondered if he just didn’t feel attraction like that, to people he didn’t know well enough to trust. It felt almost wrong in a way, since they grew up like siblings and Taeil knew all the weird and ugly sides of Yuta, like how he used to pick his nose and wipe it on his pants, or how he sometimes forgot to brush his teeth at night, or how he’d stayed up watching anime and didn’t shower for three days. Whatever _attractive_ was, that probably wasn’t it.

And then, like a train, it hit him. 

It was almost as if puberty had some weird vendetta against him and plotted exactly what time being suddenly attracted to people would fuck Taeil up the most. It hit in high school like a bus of feelings, starting and ending at Lee Taeyong Stop. 

Hormones were fucking weird, and it was a lot, and Taeil didn’t know how to deal with it. He’d watched anime and movies and dramas with Yuta, and yeah, there were all sorts of different types of love and lust and attraction and crushes, but it would’ve gone a lot smoother if Taeil didn’t start as a blubbering mess and everything decided to hit him all at once, making him even more of an embarrassment. Life had a funny way of doing that to him.

Taeyong was holding his hand out, waiting for Taeil to shake it like a normal person. "I’m Taeyong," he said smoothly, as if they’d never seen each other before.

"I’m leaving," replied Taeil, and before Yuta could protest, he turned on his heel and darted out of the locker room and out of the gym’s back entrance and into the autumn air. 

—

From: Yuta  
To: Taeil  
10:18AM: taeil

From: Yuta  
To: Taeil  
10:20AM: taeillie

From: Yuta  
To: Taeil  
10:20AM: taeillie r u home

From: Yuta  
To: Taeil  
10:21AM: wait nvm i saw u walk past ur window meaning ur probably not checking ur texts!!!

From: Yuta  
To: Taeil  
10:25AM: taeillie i got u a present!! :(

From: Yuta  
To: Taeil  
10:31AM: if u dont reply im coming over

From: Yuta  
To: Taeil  
10:40AM: im coming over thru the front door meaning u have no choice but to accept me into your heart

From: Yuta  
To: Taeil  
10:40AM: home** 

From: Yuta  
To: Taeil  
10:40AM: i meant home but same

Even through the closed door, Taeil’s mom making small talk with Yuta in the foyer was way too loud. Didn’t Yuta have anything better to do than to bother Taeil on a Saturday morning, which was precisely the _worst_ time to bother him? Truthfully, Taeil had been watching the text messages roll in since after the one about seeing him walk past his bedroom window; Taeil closed it for good measure but by then Yuta was probably already outside his door. 

"Taeil!" Yuta huffed, throwing open his bedroom door and looking like he’d just walked out of a dryer. "Wow, I haven’t come in this way in a while. Has your bed always been that small?"

"You just grew tall," Taeil mumbled, throwing his legs off the side of his bed where he’d been lying since waking up a few hours ago. It’d only been a day and he’d already started holing himself up in his room. Senior year was going swimmingly.

Yuta hummed, pleased, and flopped down next to Taeil. "Okay, so like, I got you a present. And you’re not allowed to refuse."

"I—" Taeil started, rubbing his palms against his knees and staring at the floor. "I’m sorry about the other day."

Yuta blinked at him and then shot him another one of his radiant smiles. "Oh, c’mon, as long as you’re not flaking out on joining the team, then we’re all good." (Funny, because that was precisely what Taeil had holed himself in his room to carefully consider doing.) Yuta then jumped off the bed and led Taeil to the connecting bathroom, a plastic bag in his other hand. "Present, present."

"Why are we going into the bathroom," Taeil mumbled. "This is suspicious."

"We’ll need a mirror. And a lot of space," replied Yuta smartly.

"What are we _doing_?"

"Bleaching your hair."

—

"I'm calling Taeyong," Yuta annouced as soon as he turned off the water, leaving Taeil to grope around blindly for a towel and contemplate impending doom.

Taeil sighed. "Taeyong," he said flatly, not bothering to hide the skepticism in his voice. Not that he didn't trust Taeyong just because his eyebrows were perfect and his eyes sometimes seemed like they were looking right through you and he slept through every class but managed to get by with decent grades.

"Yeah, apparently his parents know some celebrity stylists, it's pretty rad. None of us believed it until Hansol came in one day completely blonde. And Taeyong just went platinum this summer. He has connections, man," Yuta explained, typing furiously at his phone.

After about four dial tones, a sleepy voice said over the speaker, "Dude, what the fuck."

"It's four in the afternoon, it's a perfectly reasonable time to call," Yuta countered, and Taeyong groaned from the other end.

"No time is reasonable outside of school and practice. I was having a good dream, too," he mused.

Yuta rolled his eyes and shot Taeil a grin, which Taeil tried to return, but the disaster that was his hair was impeding on his mood, and he hadn't even seen it yet— Yuta's reaction told him enough.

"It's urgent," Yuta said. 

After a brief explanation of the current predicament and some well-timed bribing, Taeyong said, "Okay, I'm coming over to take a look."

—

Taeyong showed up with a professional looking black tote and looking like the definition of platinum, from his hair to the loose tee framing his squared shoulders to the way his penetrating eyes inspected the bird's nest on top of Taeil's head as Taeil struggled to look up at him with half as much gusto. 

"What you should've done is _tone_ ," Taeyong said gently to Taeil as Taeil glanced back at him in the mirror, watching him shoot Yuta an incriminating glare as Yuta smiled sheepishly back. 

"He didn't mean to make this into a big thing," Taeil explained, falling back into the habit of bailing Yuta out. 

Taeyong nodded with a little pursed, duck-faced smile that Taeil had never seen up close before— they shared half their classes, but Taeyong usually sat in the back staring out the window or doodling in his notes, gaze directed downward and eyelashes fanned modestly over his cheekbones. He covered his face while he dozed, forehead expertly balanced in his fingers, giving him the appearance of being deep in thought. And sometimes he spoke sharply to his mates, like Doyoung who got conned into copying homework for Taeyong every other day. "You're Taeil, right?" Taeyong said, pointedly ignoring Yuta who sat on the edge of the tub like a child in time-out. Taeil gaped stupidly for a couple seconds before nodding. "Yeah, Yuta talks about you a lot."

"Shut it," Yuta said without much force, his lips withering into a frown.

"He's been lying about you wanting to join the team for three years and counting now," Taeyong continued, much to Yuta's chagrin.

Taeil frowned this time. "I never told him I wanted…"

"We figured as much," finished Taeyong, calmly emptying a packet of powder into a mixing bowl. It smelled like cleaning solution and regret. "Yuta, can you come here and be useful for once?" Taeyong said, and Yuta opened his mouth to retort, then thought better of it after meeting Taeyong’s glare in the mirror. They shared something— some cute, flirty relationship that edged on romance but wasn’t quite there yet, though from the way Yuta’s eyes lingered on Taeyong’s fingers for minutes at a time, it wouldn’t be bizarre to infer otherwise. 

Taeyong’s fingers were surprisingly gentle. He manipulated Taeil’s hair with expert precision, scaling Taeil’s entire head with bleach in less than ten minutes. It was almost over too quickly; Taeil’s eyes were just fluttering closed when he heard the snap of Taeyong’s gloves hitting the bottom of the trash bin. Taeyong’s hands dropping onto Taeil’s shoulders jerked Taeil out of his trance, and he flinched away.

"My hands are clean, promise," Taeyong said, reaching for Taeil again, who had to brace himself for the impact.

"No, Taeil’s just like that sometimes," said Yuta, who’d been moping off to the side, resorting to distracting himself with some inane mobile game once Taeyong realized that Yuta’s assistance was probably making things worse.

Taeyong laughed in response. "If you’re joining the team," he said to Taeil, "you’re gonna have to get used to it."

"I’m just," Taeil said, "—it’s new, is all."

Yuta had gone back to his game, and Taeyong’s gaze met Taeil’s in a sad, sympathetic way, though it was hard to imagine there was ever a time in Taeyong’s life where he didn’t have people all over him buzzing around in his space. "We can practice," Taeyong said. "As much as possible. Here, stand."

And, in a daze, Taeil stood. His hair stuck out in all directions molded with a blueish chemical paste, and in the mirror, he looked tired and confused. Taeyong’s hands folded around his shoulders like a scarf, holding him in place as he flinched instinctively again. And then they were trailing down his arms, raising goosebumps on him even in the stagnant late summer air. When Taeyong’s hands reached Taeil’s wrists, he laced their fingers together for a moment before shifting his fingertips to Taeil’s hips, looking straight at him in the mirror. Taeil was frozen in place, almost too bemused to look away. In the silence, Yuta looked up at them.

"Taeil won’t even do skinship with _me_ ," Yuta whined, and Taeil smiled softly back at him but said nothing.

"Try not to tense up so much," Taeyong murmured, his hands resting on Taeil’s shoulders until he pretty much forced them down in an effort to relax. "The more tense you are, the more the landing is going to hurt."

Taeil shuddered at that. Flyer. _Flyer_. He was going to be in the air, flipping and twisting with not even a day of experience supporting him, and everyone on the team seemed perfectly okay with that. 

As if reading his mind, Taeyong said, "Don't think too far ahead. That’s the first rule of sports— concentrate on right here, right now."

Taeyong had a way of saying things that was innately calming. If Yuta were a lion, loud and upfront and headstrong, Taeyong would be a swan— neither predator nor prey, but elegance personified into balanced existence. They stood for a while like that, the faint noises of Yuta’s game in the background, sunlight poking in between the moving clouds and shining through the skylight, until Taeyong patted Taeil’s shoulder and Taeil noticed his own fingers dangling loose, no longer clenched into fists.

"Let’s get this washed out," Taeyong said, moving over to the shower, and Taeil trailed behind him, maybe falling a little in love before knowing what love really even was.

—

It turned out a soft straw-blonde, a color that was both strange and comforting, like it was a part of himself that had always been there but never bothered to come out on its own. "It looks nice," Taeyong said while snipping some of the split ends as Taeil sat in front of him with his knees together. Yuta looked on attentively, his eyes bright with wonder. "It suits you."

"Thanks," murmured Taeil, his ears flushing red. He still flinched when Taeyong touched the back of his neck. 

"Pretty," Yuta said, and Taeil looked at him sharply. Yuta grinned back. "What, you’ve always been a looker, you know."

"You just like blonde," Taeil quipped back, smug at Yuta’s full face flush. 

"I agree though," Taeyong interrupted. "It’s soft, like you."

Taeil pursed his lips playfully. "Okay, I know I’m a pushover, but—"

"No, I’m serious," Taeyong said, laughing and ruffling Taeil’s hair into place. "You seem like someone who’d be easy to catch."

"He means in cheer," Yuta added quickly. "Not like. Easy."

"I meant in _cheer_ ," Taeyong repeated desperately. "Oh my god, I just called you easy."

"He’s not easy," said Yuta, nudging Taeil’s shoulder. "Taeil doesn’t date people."

"I’m still here, you know," Taeil said. "I just haven’t found the right… person. Why are we talking about this?"

Taeyong kicked Yuta’s shin lightly. "Maybe he just doesn’t tell you because he knows you’d blab about it to the whole school."

"Okay, come on," retorted Yuta.

"Seriously, I feel like I know more about Taeil than about you sometimes," Taeyong said, laughing and dodging Yuta swatting at his shoulder. 

"I was just making it easier so he doesn’t have to introduce himself," said Yuta. "Right Taeil? I knew you’d join eventually. Taeil doesn’t talk about himself much."

Taeil groaned and buried his face in his hands, very much wanting them both out of his house yet begrudgingly enjoying the company. Taeyong’s voice was a welcome respite to break up Yuta's monopoly over the sounds that came and went through Taeil’s room. Taeyong and Yuta bickering brought a liveliness that Taeil’s room had never seen before. Neither Taeyong nor Yuta had particularly extreme personalities, but their differences complemented each other— Taeyong automatically moved to clear the bathroom counter and arrange the bottles and lotions while Yuta distracted himself from obligations with mobile games. Yuta talked himself up, fishing for validation, and Taeyong pulled away cheekily, keeping him hanging on by a thread but never giving him that complacent satisfaction. Taeil was between wondering why Yuta didn’t just confess to Taeyong already and understanding why he wouldn’t want to risk such a comfortable relationship.

It was a balance that propped up the entire team. Taeyong was the captain, and Yuta was his right-hand man. Things would get awkward, and they had a season ahead of them. Something would have to change, or Yuta would have to reach breaking point. Whichever came first.

Of course, Taeil mightily ignored the possibility that he himself might be that change.

—

Ten was the only who recognized Taeil the next practice, bouncing out of his stretches to ruffle Taeil’s hair and tug it in all different directions. The others assumed they’d never seen him before and that his hair had always been blonde, and Taeil begged Yuta to keep it that way, as desperate as Yuta was to rehash the horrifying chain of events that had passed that Saturday. "New hair, new you," Yuta sang as he pushed down on Taeil’s back in their stretching routine. Taeyong hit him up with a training regimen that had been passed down from Hansol to Johnny to Taeyong to Yuta and now to him and Ten, though Ten was faring substantially better, having come from a dance background and being naturally flexible. 

"Don’t worry," Taeyong said when Taeil shrieked uncharacteristically as Yuta attempted to push him into the splits. "Yuta was like a wooden board when he first got here."

"Okay, now who’s the one blabbing," Yuta grumbled.

"I just feel like Taeil deserves to know about you here, too, given how much you’ve talked about him," Taeyong mused, and Yuta rolled his eyes. 

"I’m not particularly interesting," said Taeil. "What does he even have to talk about?"

"Honestly, I don’t even remember anymore," Yuta said, rubbing the back of his neck sheepishly. "Taeyong's exaggerating. He just wants an excuse to tell embarrassing stories about me."

"Like that one time you split your pants during competition and didn’t notice until three days later?" said Taeyong, and Yuta shoved him off the mat.

For being a physical sport that required physical movement, it actually wasn’t so bad. Stretching was relaxing in a way when Yuta wasn’t leaning his entire body weight on Taeil’s shoulder blades or poking the inside of Taeil’s thighs, making unsolicited comments about how soft they were. "Okay, some of us don’t work out," snapped Taeil, tendons shelling out painful complaints as his splits got closer to the ground each day. 

"I’m saying it’s cute, dumbass," Yuta replied, curling in on himself and pouting up at Taeil.

"Oh," said Taeil sadly. 

The conditioning was the most physically taxing part, but it was also a good excuse not to have to interact with people, which gave Taeil enough energy to finish the extra laps around the track Taeyong assigned him while Yuta looked on like a proud mother. The most mentally taxing part had to be balancing a precarious relationship with Taeyong while Yuta hovered around them, utterly unaware of the depth of Taeil’s affection, adoration— whatever the feeling was that made him so sick to his stomach whenever Taeyong asked to practice privately or adjusted the bend in Taeil’s knee or hooked an arm around Taeil’s shoulder, heavy with the burden of keeping a secret you weren’t even sure was valid. 

Nonetheless, with practice, Taeil became more and more accustomed to willing his skin to soften, his body to relax as soon as he felt Taeyong’s body heat pushing its way into his territory, spotting his handsprings, holding up his ankles, massaging the knots in his shoulders and calves. Taeyong was easy to admire in that he did things so clean and methodical and had individualized practice schedules for everyone to follow. That Doyoung kid had to have been helping him with some of that. 

("It’s true, I saw Taeyong had a bunch of DVDs of our practices labeled 'For Doyoung' in his bag one day," Yuta said when Taeil asked him about it. "Plus Taeyong used to be really bad with money, and Doyoung had to work as our club treasurer for like a year."

"That’s so cute," Taeil said with a laugh, and Yuta grinned on with him— or rather _at_ him, as if just happy to see Taeil smile.)

After getting the basics down, it was only logical to move onto practicing stunts together. This also corresponded with Taeyong’s training schedule, which was going more or less according to plan. They started practicing in pairs first: Taeil naturally gravitated toward Yuta and Taeyong, but Taeyong had to go help Ten, who was talented but didn’t know what the fuck he was doing half the time and looked like a walking recipe for disaster. 

Yuta, strangely enough, accepted Taeil wholeheartedly. It was strange because Yuta usually encouraged Taeil to get out of his comfort zone. It was strange because outside of stretches, Yuta usually shoved Taeil toward someone else so that Taeil could get used to the rest of them. Most of the time, Taeil’s second choice was Taeyong— it was strange because it was the first time Taeyong couldn’t be there. But Yuta was changing; they were all changing after being in such close proximity to each other for so many hours of the day. It was oddly reminiscent of the summer Yuta had spent in cheerleading camp, Yuta going through these weird behavioral changes that kept Taeil on his toes and yet deep down, curious for more. What would come next? Who was Yuta really? It was like Taeil instinctively _knew_ Yuta but could never verbalize it coherently, not even to himself. 

Yuta would take long looks at Taeil sometimes, probably studying his body or where he needed to train more. They moved together like branches in a storm, and Taeil bent for him and fell into his arms like it was natural. They stuck to simple stunts and poses of course, but the thrill of success was one of the most simple pleasures of doing sports. Neither of them spoke a word about how natural it felt, despite both having witnessed how long it took Taeyong to work with Taeil to even get him to hold his hand without freezing up. 

Being with Yuta was just _different_. Their bodies said what words couldn’t. They were unusually quiet— well, Yuta was unusually quiet— when they practiced together, both subconsciously concentrated on balancing out the other. Sometimes Taeyong would look on pleased, breathing, "You guys really are incredible."

In retrospect, they put everything off way too long. Maybe because they liked being with each other, or maybe because Taeil was _juuust_ finally getting comfortable, and Yuta liked seeing him happy day after day. But they had both known Hansol, Taeil’s other base, would have to be brought into the routine at some point. It ended up being that elephant in the room no one wanted to talk about as Yuta and Taeil both feigned blissful ignorance. "When you start getting comfortable is when you move onto the next challenge," Yuta used to always say with gusto, but it was like even he didn’t have the heart to pry Taeil away from his side. "He’s chill, he’ll get it," Yuta said when Taeil brought Hansol up a few times.

Hansol was only mildly less intimidating than Johnny. He had big eyes and looked like he either wanted to eat your or dump you into a river depending on the time of day. A week before their first invitational, Hansol did end up approaching them about the routine. It was almost like Yuta had felt Taeil shrink back when Hansol approached them from behind, because Yuta tensed a bit, too. "We really should start… working together more, all three of us," Hansol said awkwardly, and Yuta gave him a weirdly sharp stare. Even Hansol’s awkwardness was a little intimidating in itself; it was almost scary to imagine that Hansol might unintentionally say something hurtful, like he was intimidating without even trying. 

"… Okay," Yuta said after a while, and he and Hansol looked at each other as if they didn’t know each other anymore. 

And Taeil, after being so out-of-practice with relaxing for strangers, with _trusting_ them, stiffened up like it was Day 1 with Taeyong all over again.

The first time Taeil hit the ground from that height after kicking ungracefully into Hansol knocked the wind out of him. It hurt, but not as much as his bruised pride. Even Taeyong jogged over and bent down at his side. "You okay?"

Taeil mumbled something noncommittal in reply, and suddenly the next week or so that they had before the competition flashed in front of his eyes like a horror film on fast-forward. 

It wasn’t the pain from the hundreds of falls that week that struck so hard each day— it was that familiar stinging behind your eyes and the ache in your head. It was like wanting to cry. It was the thought of disappointing Taeyong with something they could’ve so easily prevented. 

It was like being with Yuta had weakened Taeil, like being on vacation and having to get back into the swing of things. Taeil was suddenly distinctly aware of Taeyong’s eyes on him, _everyone’s_ eyes on him, and the weight of the world all alone when, all this time, Yuta had been helping hold it up with him.

Practice always came with its own bag of mixed emotions, depending on how well they’d done the previous day, whether or not Taeil was getting any closer to landing his tuck jump, whether Yuta or Hansol was the one who started the argument about whose fault it was that Taeil’s knees were stiff as dry wood when he came back down. They’d all been doing so well, pumped up on adrenaline and the rush of flying forward, your partners following your tailwinds and being dragged along with you. The big roadblock ended up hitting like in a cliched story. Things just had to happen that way.

Taeil wasn’t good with emotions, and high school boys in competitive sports were like an outpouring of them on steroids. And Taeil was just swept away with the current, but he’d never been trained how to compartmentalize and let it out later. So every time Taeyong looked over with that concerned face of his that hurt so much (so much more than Taeil’s wrist twisting under him against the mat, or his tailbone taking all his weight in one blow, or his nose smashing into Hansol’s shoulder), Taeil just stood up, brushed off the sweat (from his eyeballs), and said, "Again."

"We’ve gone through this like 50 times today," Yuta huffed, bent over with his hands on his knees. The gymnasium was coolly bright— it was getting dark out and the fluorescent lighting had been left to light up the building all alone. If Taeil stared at the fans on the ceiling too long the whole world started spinning around him. "You’re going to hurt yourself."

"You’re not the one who had to start from nothing this year," Taeil snapped, wiping sweat off his forehead. " _Again_."

Yuta flinched at first, backing up defensively. He then pursed his lips and said nothing. 

"Come on guys, we’ll get this," Hansol offered, and Taeil nodded. 

Yuta was usually so headstrong and determined, so what was it about this that made things so different? What had gone so wrong? Taeil knew how to put his head to the grindstone and work it out. That was something he and Yuta were both good at. They both deserved a little break, in the form of each other. Taeil had read somewhere a long time ago in some sort of psychology seminar his parents (doctors) had dragged him to about the dangers of codependence. And it seemed like the closer he got to Yuta, the more scared he felt about pulling away. The whole project of this year had been to distance himself from Yuta, and he’d been doing pretty good at it too, forcing himself to train with Taeyong. _One step at a time,_ Yuta had said in the beginning of the year. But it was kinda more like one step forward and two steps back, because now Taeil was stuck between two wrong answers— Yuta, the Familiar, and Taeyong, the Forbidden, and the farther he ran from one, the closer he’d get to the other.

—

It all just sort of came to a much needed climax the next day when Taeil accidentally kicked Hansol in the face and gave him a bloody nose. And suddenly Ten and Yuta were running around screaming like headless chickens because high school boys couldn’t stomach the concept of blood anywhere outside their bodies. Hansol went to the nurse and Taeil felt the familiar film of existential dread settling over him. Quitting on the spot sounded like a great idea. And while he was at it, maybe he could just move to Antarctica and change his name so he’d never have to face any of these people again.

So the next day Taeil walked in to practice wanting to die, and Taeyong immediately approached him wearing a glare that could bring entire countries to their knees. There might have been rational, non-catastrophic thoughts lurking in some far off place in Taeil’s mind, but they were nowhere to be found that afternoon, and he was near tears by the time they met face to face in the center of the gym. 

Taeyong spoke first, but not for long. "I—"

"I understand," Taeil said immediately, flustered and looking down at his shoes and blinking back an outpouring of tears. "I’ll talk to an administrator immediately. I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean for it to happen, especially after so many practice jumps. I’m really not athletic or flexible at all, and—"

"Wait, _wait_ , Taeil, slow down. An administrator?" Taeyong said incredulously, grabbing Taeil’s shoulders and effectively stopping him in his tracks. It was almost as if Taeil’s mouth was either on turbo mode and never knowing when to stop, or frozen up completely. There was no in between. Being told to slow down was almost worse than being told to speak up, because feeling out of control in those manic moments was already bad enough. "Not flexible? What are you talking about?"

"You... wanted to talk to me about yesterday, right?" Taeil said carefully, glancing at the mats, the duffle bags piled in the corner, the school shoes scattered in some haphazard pattern between the door and the bleachers, anywhere but at Taeyong.

"Yeah, but just to say that I changed up the routine a little bit," said Taeyong. It was only then that Taeil noticed the concern in his voice and the softness of his expression. Taeil looked up then, and Taeyong’s eyes were shining, brimming with— sadness? Or possibly a regret so strong that Taeil had to take a step back. "It’s my fault," Taeyong continued. And Taeil’s voice did that flip-flop thing, like someone had flipped the switch from manic to dead silent. And there they were, all the denials, all the _no, no, it’s not your fault at all_ s he wanted to say clogging up in his throat like phlegm or spit. "I shouldn’t have made you practice with Hansol for that long."

"What?" said Taeil. "No— I mean, Hansol and I are friends. He’s really nice. And he’s helped me so much. I just— I don’t… I don’t know. I don’t know why my body does this."

Taeyong sighed, apparently still not convinced it had absolutely nothing to do with him and everything to do with Taeil’s inability to give back to the people who were willing to give everything for him. "To tell the truth, I… I kind of felt it wouldn’t work out from the beginning." Taeyong relaxed his grip on Taeil’s shoulders— his hands were surprisingly strong, despite his mild demeanor. "I do a lot of observing on this team— I kind of have to, to choreograph working routines. I saw how uncomfortable you were."

"I wasn’t—"

"Not toward Hansol in particular," Taeyong continued, nodding at Taeil. "It’s… it’s everyone. I know."

Taeil couldn’t help but feel like Taeyong was disappointed in him. But at least he understood. Taeil pushed away the feeling quickly— he’d just have to make it up to Taeyong later. He could do that. There would be opportunities, right? 

"From now on, Yuta and I will be your bases," Taeyong announced. "Hansol and Johnny are closer in height anyway. It’ll be fine."

"We have a competition tomorrow," said Taeil quietly.

Taeyong grinned, a vigor showing in his eyes that must’ve shown a little of what gave him the personality— the determination, the obstinacy, the ambition— to bring him this far in the first place. Taeil had seen him more or less as a manager of sorts, a pillar of support, or the glue holding everything together, but something about him had to have demonstrated to the rest of the team that he had not only the self-discipline but the experience and _skill_ to be the captain in the first place. And only in the face of adversity, apparently, did it really rear its head. "That means we have a little over 24 hours to get this right."

— — —   
— — — 

Yuta might’ve been a little tipsy when he answered the door to an awkward-looking Taeil, who was accompanied by a suitcase, a backpack, and wide eyes. This wasn’t really how they did things— Taeil formally staying at Yuta’s house because Taeil’s parents were away. This wasn’t how they did things, Taeil entering through the front door with purpose and gusto and an announcement that he was There, taking up space, being a guest when they were used to each other as immovable presences in each others' lives. "Hi," Yuta said, leaning against the doorframe with a luxurious grin that was both persistent and unreasonable.

Taeil wrinkled his nose. "Were you _drinking_?"

Yuta shrugged. "My parents let my sisters and me do it on holidays sometimes. Wanna join us?"

"No," said Taeil quickly. He then added, "…thanks. No thanks."

"Cool," Yuta replied. "We can just hang in my room then."

This was decidedly Not how they did things— announcing what they were going to do, Taeil sliding his shoes off at the door and lugging his suitcase up the stairs behind him, Yuta leading them to his room in awkward silence. Yuta could probably count the number of times Taeil had seen his room on his fingers. On the other hand, Taeil’s room was like a little campout to Yuta, like a second home. Taeil stood at the door until Yuta beckoned him in, and then he sat on Yuta's bed gingerly, as if trying not to leave a mark on the comforter. 

"Um, I have games, and there’s food," said Yuta a little pathetically, standing in front of Taeil. Even the alcohol wasn’t helping much with this. They were fine a few hours ago; Yuta even saw Taeil’s parents off when they left in a taxi for the airport. It was like Taeil had packed all his clothes and toiletries and homework in his suitcase but had left a part of himself in his house, a part that was so heavy and dense it couldn’t make it past the threshold.

"It’s fine," said Taeil softly. "I need to get some reading done anyway." 

Taeil seemed to be able to close in on himself in unfamiliar spaces, building a little wall around him and letting his element fill that like water in a bucket, to occupy that small space earnestly and wholeheartedly. To Taeil, it was too much trouble to spread himself thin by keeping track of the entire room. Yuta was not drunk enough for this. "Okay," he said to nothing in particular. He then repeated, "Okay," again, with more strength. "Let me know if you need anything."

Taeil hummed, already curled up with his back folded against where the wall met the floor, his knees pointed toward the ceiling. 

And yet, like a balloon tied to Yuta’s wrist, Taeil— or at least thoughts of him— seemed to follow Yuta down the stairs, into the dining room, and to the table, where Yuta drank and said nothing, and maybe drank a little more like he was some pathetic yuppie who just broke up with their girlfriend, and then maybe drank some more, but it only made it worse. So he excused himself and dragged his feet back up the stairs, not really sure how much time had passed by, and found Moon Taeil exactly how he had left him. When Taeil was scared he froze up like how animals played dead. 

"Ah, Taeyong was reading that before practice," Yuta said, leaning against the door. Taeil’s eyes flicked upward toward Yuta over the cover of his book. Taeyong had been in Taeil’s class for years. Not that Yuta was jealous or anything. Okay, maybe just a bit jealous. He’d gotten over the Taeil thing like ages ago, before they were even the same height and— this was about Taeyong, anyway— and now Yuta had grown a little taller than Taeil without either of them really noticing, and before, Taeil was the only person in Yuta’s world, and now Taeil was just someone Yuta wanted to protect. With his life. And maybe a little more. He’d protect Taeil halfway to heaven, probably. That wasn’t exactly _love_ , though, right? 

And then there was the whole Lee Taeyong conundrum.

Yuta wasn’t a shallow guy. He really wasn’t. Even when Hansol was the poster boy for cheer— sure, he was hot, okay, and maybe Yuta had the hots for him for a little while, but the Taeil thing was still simmering at that point in time, and Yuta was still figuring things out. And Taeyong was hot, but in like a different way, a way that made you feel secure, like you could do whatever the hell you wanted and he’d be there to pick up the pieces. Yuta had always been picking up the pieces— or rather, holding Taeil together anyway, and not having to worry about that around Taeyong was like opening a kaleidoscope and being able to actually step inside. Taeyong was strong, and perfect, and he did everything right. He was unshakable in his convictions; he was the protagonist in the lives of everyone he touched. 

"Taeil," Yuta said, flopping on his bed, and Taeil hummed in acknowledgement, barely detectable. "What if you think you like someone?"

Taeil sniffed and said nothing. When Yuta looked at him, Taeil was still staring in his book, but his eyes had stopped moving across the page. "Dunno," he said softly.

Yuta rolled onto his back, tossing a stuffed dog he kept on his bed up and down. Its name was Momiji. "Don’t tell me you’ve never liked someone before."

"And what about it?" Taeil bit back. "I can’t say I have. If I did, I wouldn’t pursue it. They probably wouldn’t even know me."

"Don’t be like that," Yuta whined. That phrase had sort of taken up residence in his everyday arsenal of language, and Taeil usually reacted by rolling his eyes. Which was exactly what he did. 

"Who do you like?" Taeil pressed on after a while of silence. "Is it Taeyong?"

"How'd you guess," Yuta said flatly, and Taeil patted Yuta's head with the cover of his book lightly.

"I’m psychic," said Taeil. 

They were quiet again except for the rhythmic sound of Momiji landing in Yuta’s hands, then being tossed up in the air again, then landing again. "… So we’re cool?" Yuta said hesitantly. 

"What?" Taeil replied.

Yuta turned on his stomach, smushing Momiji flat under him, and stared straight at Taeil, who seemed unnerved by the attention. "You’re cool?"

"We’ve always been cool," Taeil said softly. "What do you mean?"

Yuta faked looking around the room, eyes wide with drama, and the corners of Taeil’s mouth quirked up into a smile. "I’m _gay_ ," Yuta whispered harshly, and Taeil laughed. 

"Better than not knowing what 'liking' even feels like," Taeil said, and Yuta grinned at him, biting his bottom lip between his teeth and suddenly feeling elated. What had they been so uneasy about before, anyway? Taeil was a good friend, and he always understood in his own, quiet way. Even if he was unpredictable, at least he was consistent in his unpredictability. 

"But you like meeee," Yuta said, pulling Momiji out from under him and nuzzling Taeil’s face with her fuzzy nose. Taeil’s smile then seemed to _shine_ , big as a theater screen and bright like spotlights. 

"Sorry, but I know too much about you for you to make my heart flutter," Taeil teased, and Yuta punched him lightly on the shoulder. 

"Hey, I’ve smelled Taeyong’s dirty gym shorts and he’s still hot to me," Yuta countered, and Taeil wrinkled his nose.

"You guys are gross," he said. "Shame, I was considering joining cheer next year, too."

"What— _hey_!" snapped Yuta, and Taeil laughed and scooted away from Yuta, who was scrambling to poke at Taeil’s sides.

—

Yuta didn’t know when being around Taeyong for long enough turned into a crush. Maybe everyone who spent enough time with Taeyong was like that. It must’ve been just before being in love turned from fun to stressful. The middle school trysts felt like a honeymoon compared to this, realizing you maybe were in love with your best— no, your second best friend and then being keenly aware of every single one of your own actions around him. In middle school, it was all _Taeil Taeil Taeil Hansol Hansol Hansol_ ; it was enough just to notice _them_ and how _they_ moved around, all the little barely detectable things that made them so effortlessly attractive. It was blissful and innocent; it was a different kind of love, one that required little thought or effort and just made you unconditionally happy, like a good meal or catching your favorite cartoon on television. 

Yuta thought about Taeyong (and how Taeyong thought of him) so much, in fact, that when he came home from practice and climbed into Taeil’s room at the end of the day, Taeil was like a much-needed break from this sudden, unwelcome wave of insecurity. What would he do without Taeil, good, strange little Taeil, who’d been there since day 1 and was still there, supporting him in his own way?

"I don’t want to go to training camp," Yuta whined petulantly. "That’s like, way too much time with all those dudes."

"It’ll be fun," Taeil said lightly, typing away on his laptop with his back propped against the side of his bed. "Taeyong will be there."

"Yeah, but don’t you just— I mean, even if you _really_ like someone, don’t you ever just feel like you’re getting way too much of them?" Yuta said. He was lying on Taeil’s floor, his torso perpendicular to Taeil’s feet, staring at the ceiling. Something about its off-whiteness was calming, like a sky full of clouds.

"You never get tired of me," Taeil point out, not looking up.

Yuta hummed in wonder. It was true. Taeil was more like a shadow than another person— like an organ that was not really necessarily for living but hung around anyway. Yuta could’ve said nothing, but it felt wrong to leave such a enlightening statement unanswered. So he said cheekily, "You’re different."

Taeil looked up then, eyeing Yuta, who was smiling back at him. "Touche," was all he said then, going back to his laptop. Yuta grunted in satisfaction and rolled onto his back again. It was hot that day, so he was staying as low to the ground as possible. Taeil seemed unbothered, though he was at least wearing shorts and a t-shirt to at least acknowledge the heat instead of fumbling around like some unaffected demigod in his sweaters and jeans like he used to when they were little. "What makes being around him so unpleasant anyway?" Taeil said suddenly, and Yuta looked up.

"What?"

Taeil shrugged, putting his laptop down and folding his legs under him, giving Yuta his undivided attention, which made Yuta flush a little. It was always hard for Taeil to look someone straight in the eye while talking to them, Yuta included, so he usually looked into a book or a screen, even if he wasn’t reading it. Maybe Yuta was just unused to him now, staring right at Yuta’s face, or maybe it was the heat. "Dunno, I’ve never had a crush before. I want to know what it feels like."

Yuta scrunched his face. "It’s… tiring," he said finally.

"Hm," said Taeil. 

"Like I always have to act my best around him. You know, to impress him."

"But you don’t try to impress other people?" Taeil said.

Yuta thought for a moment. There _was_ a time with other people— with _you_ , he wanted to say, but it wasn’t like that then. Hansol was different, too, mostly because they didn’t really spend that much time together. There was a time with Taeil, but it was like Yuta hadn’t been sure of his feelings then, so proceeding with the status quo seemed to make the most sense. He was a kid— you didn’t really think so much then. Things were simpler. Of course, he never did the kind of worrying Taeil or even Taeyong could sometimes do, so maybe Yuta was just unprepared for it. 

After a while of silence, Taeil’s question going unanswered, Taeil huffed and said, "Then we should practice."

Yuta furrowed his eyebrows. "What?"

"You know, practice," Taeil said, toeing at Yuta’s side a little where he was ticklish. Yuta squirmed. "Like when  
you said we could practice my emotions when we were little kids. And I’m a little better at them now. So… with Taeyong, we should practice."

Yuta laughed, and Taeil grinned beside him. "Okay, sure."

"I’ll be Taeyong," Taeil said. "What would you say?"

"Dunno," Yuta said, turning back toward the ceiling and resting his hands on his stomach. "I like you, maybe."

"Hey, bud, I like you too!" Taeil said, clearly having too much fun with this, and Yuta pushed at his foot.

"You’re not being a very good Taeyong."

"Well you’re not being a very good Yuta," Taeil shot back. "Come on, be serious. What would you say?"

Yuta rolled onto his stomach so that he was facing Taeil, his head propped up in his hands. Taeil had drawn his feet together and toward himself so that his legs made a little butterfly on the ground. "I dunno, honestly. I mean, I’d say I like you, Taeil."

"Taeyong," Taeil said.

"Right," Yuta replied. In the sunlight, a light sheen of sweat over his face, Taeil looked radiant. Not perfect, but radiant. His hair tended to get brown in the summer from overexposure to the sun— that is, all the sun he got through his window when he sat on his bed and read or surfed the web most of the day. It was currently a beautiful chestnut color, and looked warm, like a fireplace, or the sun shining on your back on a windy day, or like home. 

"You like me? What do you mean?" Taeil said, looking down at Yuta with mock concern. Yuta snorted. Taeyong would never say something like that, but Taeil was trying, and it was cute.

In middle school, crushes were like this thing where you just liked looking at pretty people or pretty things. Whether it was a flower or a handsome person or a well-decorated cake, they might as well all have been the same thing. Maybe they were smart or had admirable qualities to add to the mixture. None of it related to _you_ ; you weren’t really part of the picture, because you never really looked at yourself. You didn’t know who you were (yet). It wasn’t until high school that Yuta started conceptualizing the actual prospect of dating, him included. Going to the movies with Taeyong, or holding hands with him, or kissing in front of Yuta’s door when Taeyong drove him home in a flashy motorcycle and dropped him off at nighttime, past curfew. It was awfully cheesy but fun to think about, like stories about dragons and tanuki and mythical creatures you’d make up when you were a kid. 

But imagining sometimes got him into trouble, too, like when you let yourself get your hopes up too much. Like one time when Yuta was really little, he’d convinced himself he really could jump in mid-air, like jump once, then jump again. He’d leapt off the railing of his apartment's (fortunately) first floor balcony and twisted his ankle and couldn’t play soccer for weeks. So he usually stopped at the kissing part, because what came after that was unknown and scary, like maybe he’d never get there, or even if he got there maybe he wouldn’t like it. How did two people in love who were already together act? You couldn’t just keep confessing over and over again, but that was all he’d ever really thought about. 

"Um, like friends, I guess, but with more… touching? And stuff?" Taeil said when Yuta asked him about it. It was getting late, and Yuta had to be at school early the next morning to catch the bus to the camp. "You know," Taeil said out the window as he watched Yuta descend the tree in the dark. The night was loud with crickets and cicadas and a little anxiety and confusion and anxiety _about_ confusion. It was all very complicated. And it made Yuta feel unsure of himself, and that really sucked. Yuta hated being unsure of himself. "Sometimes people say their spouse is like their best friend, too. So maybe you could act like best friends with him?"

"But you’re my best friend," Yuta said simply, landing on the ground with an _oof_.

— — —  
— — —

The competition went almost too well. In the grand scheme of things, Taeil feeling like a jittery flan pudding on the ride there and wobbling on shaky knees all the way into the other school’s gymnasium wasn’t really that big a deal. Yuta patted his arm and said, "You’re gonna do great," and pointed at Ten, who was clinging obnoxiously to Hansol’s side, fingers curled into Hansol’s uniform. "Even he’s nervous." The routine had Taeil positioned in the back and Ten, who did most of the ground stunts, in the front, but even so, the thought of being in the air in front of judges and an audience and having to take a literal leap of faith and just _trust_ that everything would be fine was frightening, like riding a bike for the first time when you’d been leaning on one training wheel and going around in circles for years.

For all the worrying, though, the actual moment went by in a flash. The three minutes they were performing was nothing compared to the 72 plus hours spent worrying about it, so that made sense. If Taeil blinked, he would’ve missed it.

"You guys are pretty incredible," Taeyong had been saying a few weeks ago, hands on his knees between wiping sweat off his face. "You and Yuta, I mean."

"Incredibly average," Yuta said, slinging an arm around Taeil’s shoulder and winking at Taeyong.

Taeyong laughed. "No, I’m serious. It took me like _weeks_ to land anything with Taeil. But he must trust you a lot."

Taeil looked up to Taeyong smiling fondly between the two of them. "What makes you say that?" Taeil said cautiously.

"You relax instantly with him." Taeyong pointed at the way Yuta had draped himself across Taeil’s shoulders. "I mean, you guys are childhood friends, right?"

And it was at least 80% true if not more. Yuta became touchier as he got older, and Taeil had just been there for the ride. They discovered themselves and warmed up to each other simultaneously, so nothing had ever seemed sudden or out of place. It was like he’d already spent the last ten years practicing with Yuta, whether he liked it or not. 

They were on the bus after eating in dazed silence at a restaurant near their school when it dawned on Taeil that they’d scored above 4 on all their jumps and techniques, that they hadn’t gotten any deductions, and their performance and composition had been given perfect 10s. To give credit where it was due, Taeyong had choreographed most all of it. Taeil stared out the window at the fields rolling by; he and Yuta sat near the front of the bus, since Taeil sometimes got motion sickness. Yuta looked antsy; he was doing that leg bouncing thing against the back of the seat in front of him (which was fortunately empty), and he’d slid low in his seat so that his head only came up to Taeil’s shoulder. 

"What’s up?" Taeil said toward the window, and Yuta stopped fidgeting for a moment before letting out a light sigh. The rest of the team sat in the back, and maybe Yuta was itching to go sit and dick around with them or something, he was just staying here with Taeil because he felt obligated. "You can go sit back there, you know."

"No," Yuta mumbled. "I kinda like it up here. Gives me space to think."

"You think?" Taeil teased, and Yuta pushed him lightly.

"I think a lot!" said Yuta defensively. "It just… usually makes everything more complicated than it has to be, so I try not to unless it’s _absolutely_ necessary."

"What’s _absolutely necessary_ to think about right now?" Taeil breathed. "Just finished the first competition. You should be happy."

" _You_ should be happy," countered Yuta, and Taeil smiled a little.

"I am," Taeil replied. "Just tired."

Yuta hummed in response. The bit of sun shining through the clouds at sunset painted the sky a pink that was almost neon. They rarely had days this sunny in the winter. After a while, Yuta slid even lower in his seat and frowned. "I… reallylikeTaeyong," he stammered quietly, almost unintelligible over the rumble of the bus engine.

It wasn’t really like Yuta to gush, not even when they were alone. He talked about Taeyong as he would a friend, but something in the cadence of his voice or the choice in his wording portrayed so much adoration that Taeil never really forgot how Yuta felt about Taeyong, even if he rarely vocalized it directly. "I know," said Taeil plainly.

"I dunno," Yuta whispered. "It’s really bothering me now. I feel like things are getting harder. Like more complicated. And I’m running out of time."

"You should just tell him," Taeil said, tensing a little. Also, maybe if Yuta told Taeyong, then Taeil’s own complicated feelings about the whole thing would back off a little. It was so indicative of the state of his life that the first time Taeil had ever really felt anything toward anyone, it ended up being toward his best friend’s longtime crush. That was just so goddamn fitting. "Don’t overthink it," he added.

Yuta wiggled his feet for a bit, stuffing his hands in his pockets. "You don’t understand," he said.

"I do," Taeil replied coolly. The response came out quick and aloof.

"You’ve never liked anyone before," Yuta pointed out. "So you’ve never had to worry about that."

On one hand, Yuta couldn’t know. He shouldn’t. It would make everything worse; there could be no positive outcome of telling Yuta— he could compete with Taeil, putting them at odds, or he could feel sorry for him and back off; somehow, being on the receiving end of Yuta’s obligatory pity seemed the worse of the two. On top of that, Taeil would have to come out as gay, too, or _whatever_ , and maybe Yuta would be uncomfortable with that, hanging around Taeil, whom he probably had zero interest in, all the time when there was clearly an imbalance in the levels of attractiveness between them. "Oh, so you think feeling nothing is better?" Taeil said flatly.

Yuta shrugged. "Yeah. Yeah, I do. Better than liking dudes who’ll probably think you’re gross for even mentioning it."

Taeil sighed. "Yuta, we’re on _cheer_ for god’s sake. You don’t think a single one of these guys is even the slightest bit not-straight?"

"Dude, too far," Yuta murmured, and Taeil shrugged. 

It was dark by the time they got to the school, and they all filed off the bus in a shaky, exhausted heap. Taeyong still looked groggy from sleep, but he shot Taeil a smile and said, "See you here tomorrow morning, okay?" and Taeil nodded while Yuta stared on from a distance with a complicated sort of expression.

—

After the first invitational, Taeyong had offered to train with Taeil in private on a regular basis, which was both problematic and thrilling. Perhaps it was thrilling _because_ it was problematic. Their conversations more or less stayed on the topic of cheer, sometimes treading into stretching or sports anatomy territory. They rarely talked outside of practice, though sometimes Taeyong would wave to Taeil in the hallway. This was comfortable and fine. 

It was liberating to finally have friends other than Yuta. Taeil constantly reminded himself that he’d accomplished the task that he’d set out to do. It felt freeing, in a way, and it highlighted all of Yuta’s shortcomings while at the same time also making apparent how much easier it was to exist with Yuta than with other, unfamiliar human beings. Silences during he and Taeyong’s practices weren’t awkward per se, especially since it was morning, but the more weeks that went by, the more Taeil was realizing that he still knew nothing about Taeyong, nor had he ever made an attempt to find out anything.

As if on cue, Taeyong called out, "How’s Yuta?" right in the middle of Taeil drilling pikes. 

Taeil paused, bouncing on his toes. "You literally just saw him yesterday," he said.

Taeyong sighed and swung his arms back and forth, pushing his fringe back from his forehead. "He’s been kinda out of it lately, so I was wondering if you knew anything about it."

There was only one real possibility, but Taeil couldn’t talk about it. So he shook his head and shrugged. Yuta was more or less transparent about his emotions, not bothering to hide the fact that he’d definitely been lost in thought for the past few weeks. Practice was much quieter, though Taeyong, Johnny, and Ten did make up for some of it.

"Damn," said Taeyong, rubbing the back of his head and looking at the ceiling. "And here I thought having you here would make it easier to get a straightforward answer."

"Let's talk about something else," Taeil said suddenly.

Taeyong looked at him. "Why?"

Taeil shrugged. "Whenever Yuta's not here, we always end up talking about him anyway."

"I don't mind it," Taeyong said casually, pulling his arm behind his head in a tricep stretch. "Whenever I'm with Yuta all he talks about is you too, so."

Taeil flushed at that, the tips of his ears going red and his shoulders scrunching up to his ears. How many embarrassing stories had they all heard already, he wondered, following Taeyong though a bit less enthusiastically. "I just... don't want our only point of contact to be Yuta is all," he said after a bit of thought.

Taeyong looked for a while at him after that. His stare was the kind of intense glower Taeil would never get used to, but at least he didn’t have to remind himself constantly anymore that Taeyong didn't hate him or want to set him on fire. Taeyong was actually soft, and his gaze was pretty, in a unique sort of way that made you want to keep staring back in case you noticed something new. And then suddenly, Taeyong laughed, breaking Taeil out of his roundoff into a whiffed landing.

"What?" said Taeil, rubbing his knee, which had taken most of the impact.

Taeyong covered his mouth, his eyes like little dancing crescents of pure, unadulterated amusement. "It's just funny how even when you and Yuta are fighting, your body seems to trust him wholeheartedly."

"We're not— I'm—" Taeil sputtered. "We're not fighting."

Taeyong sighed as he spotted Taeil's back walkover, expertly grabbing Taeil's ankles. "I watch you guys a lot. I mean, I do it with everyone. Cheer is all about teamwork, and if something is up, I have to be the first one to notice it."

Taeil went quiet at that. Okay, so he'd been provoking Yuta a little less, giving him brusque, one-word answers, but Yuta didn’t look like he wanted to be talked to. It wasn’t like anyone else was taking the initiative, either. And it gave Taeil more space to hang around the other members and try to open himself up, which should’ve been a good thing, as far as Taeyong was concerned. Taeil frowned. 

"It's weird with you guys though," Taeyong continued, setting Taeil down onto the mat. "If you just look at your movements in routine, nothing has changed. You’re still sharp." 

Taeil stretched his legs into splits position, which was making slow but steady progress. He'd never be Ten, but he could at least do the standard toe-touch now without seeing his life flash before his eyes. 

"But you guys aren't talking," said Taeyong. Taeil glared up at him, and Taeyong scoffed teasingly, crossing his arms. "Oh, come on. Don't give me that look, you know you're avoiding him," he said. "It's usually the other way around, you know— people talk and pretend like everything is fine, but their body movements say otherwise. Ten’s real good at that— talking people up when in reality he wants to kill them."

"Then why bring it up at all?" Taeil mumbled between toe-touch reps. "If our performance is fine, then the rest is… none of your business."

"I know," said Taeyong. His tone never stopped being gentle and supportive, which made Taeil feel like folding in on himself even more. "But... I consider Yuta my friend. And you, too, if you'd have me," he said, dodging Taeil's swat with a grin. "And I— I want you guys to be happy?"

Taeil rolled his eyes with extra purpose. "You sound like you're giving wedding vows."

"I wouldn’t if you guys didn’t act like such a married couple," Taeyong said. 

"Ew," Taeil breathed, whiffing his roundoff again, and Taeyong laughed. 

"Oh, I dunno," said Taeyong. "I feel like you guys would go pretty great together. You know he’s gay, right? Have you ever considered he might like you?"

Taeil shifted awkwardly. "Erm, he most definitely doesn’t," he said after a moment. Why couldn’t Yuta just confess already and get this whole thing over with? And then maybe things would change, but they couldn’t possibly be worse than this. Being the keeper of this many secrets was almost _painful_ , and Taeil was bad at lying. The only reason people trusted him with so much information was that he rarely talked in the first place. "Definitely not. I know that for a fact."

"Oh, did he tell you he likes someone else?" Taeyong asked, and Taeil stiffened.

"Maybe?" he said in a small voice and backed away, gathering his things from a small pile near the door and checking his phone. "I— I have to go now. Something came up."

—

From: Taeil  
To: Yuta  
11:21AM: please confess already and fix this mess I cant be your sounding board anymore

— — —  
— — —

Taeyong never thought he’d have to deal with this during senior year, two of the most lovesick and oblivious teammates he’d ever encountered in his years of co-ed cheerleading, gymnastics, and dance. 

Ten had actually been the first to bring it up even before Taeil had joined the team. "Is that his… boyfriend?" Ten asked during their first practice when Yuta, as if on schedule, started whining about how Taeil had a bad morning and hadn’t been replying to his texts all weekend and how they may or may not have gotten into a little fight but you could never tell with Taeil. The rest of them had gotten more or less used to it— Moon Taeil was pretty much an honorary member of the team with how much he’d been brought up in conversation before joining, but Ten was new.

It was startling at first because no one really considered it. No one knew what to say, because a firm _no_ felt kind of misplaced, but Yuta never confirmed it either, so they just laughed it off and carried on with practice. But as the idea simmered in Taeyong’s head for a few days, the unanswered pieces and loose ends started coming together in a way that just sort of felt _right_. 

It wasn’t that Yuta was lacking inspiration in any way— cheer was a team sport, and there was nothing glamorous about it. Taeyong choreographed the routines and the team followed them verbatim without any flourishes or unnecessarily stylizations, because if anything went out of sync, someone could get seriously injured. People tended to mistake cheer as a form of art when the only thing artistic about it was Hansol coming in wiggling to a new R&B playlist every week and Johnny teasing him about his horrible excuse for dance. Taeyong gave a routine speech at the beginning of every season, explaining to the freshmen that cheer wasn’t dance— it wasn’t gymnastics, it wasn’t tumbling; it wasn’t art. It was regimented and strenuous, it was communication and dedication, it was stubbornness and trust. The people who weren’t looking for that could leave, and the ones who refused to believe— well, they became people like Hansol, like Johnny, like Yuta. The memorable ones. The ones who started out one way, and through sheer effort, in between bitter arguments, physical fights, and tense competitions, through butting heads and reluctantly learning all the more about each other in the process, discovered another side of themselves they never knew they had. The side that wanted to please others but couldn’t admit it. The side that needed company whether their main guise tried to come out on top (Yuta), gruffly push away the masses (Johnny), or lounge in the corner, eerie and unnoticed (Hansol).

Taeil was like that, too, in a way. Taeyong spent a lot of time observing his teammates. It wasn’t that he was some wicked mastermind, it was just that, after so much observing, you just sort of wanted things to work out, you just wanted your teammates to be happy. And if there was a clear path to that sort of happiness, it just felt disingenuous not to nudge them toward that path when it was lying right in front of them. And sometimes, when you’re too close to the things right in front of you, you can’t see them for what they actually are. 

Taeil resisted loneliness and feared trust. Yuta was holding him in a weird limbo between _barely_ staving off voluntary solitary confinement and only having to trust one person. Yuta had been holding him there— spoon-feeding him— since elementary school. In exchange, being Taeil’s "keeper" gave Yuta satisfaction, attention, a sense of accomplishment— a sense of purpose.

So why weren’t they dating? Was it because Taeil hadn’t realized yet that he couldn’t possibly exist with anyone else by his side? Was it because neither of them could yet conceptualize how much they really meant to each other? Was it because they were emotionally constipated and dense as a metric fuckton of mercury? Probably, yes, to all of those.

What Taeyong _didn’t_ expect was for Yuta to confess to him three days before regionals like this entire fucking year didn’t even happen.

There had always been some piece of information missing from the puzzle, and now it came out in a flurry of bad decisions at the wrong time. Yuta, in all his emotionally constipated, fast-moving, attention seeking confusion, had mistakenly been crushing on _Taeyong_ this entire time. Yuta, in the busy life that had swept him up in a stimulating, hormonal flurry, didn’t know the difference between admiration and love. Knowing Yuta, none of that was really surprising at all.

Things were changing. Taeyong couldn’t keep running anymore. 

And yet, that was exactly what he did.

—

In retrospect, the invitation came at the best and worst time. Taeyong had been applying to the training camp for ages, so it wasn’t like he’d _planned_ to be assaulted by some life-changing decision right when his world seemed alarmingly out of control. 

The mail for the team always went straight to his house since they didn’t have a manager or coach. Hansol suggested getting a P.O box at some point, but they unanimously agreed that they’d all be too lazy to actually check it, so Taeyong uncomplainingly weeded through piles of junk mail every week. 

People called him a natural leader, but it felt more like he’d sort of fallen into the role. He used to ask Doyoung, who’d been their class rep for years, for approval before every decision he made, whether it was signing up for an invitational or something as small as whether the stitches in their uniform should be white or light blue. Doyoung started rebuffing him after a while once he realized that Taeyong was basically using him as a crutch. But Doyoung also wasn’t a cruel person, so he ended up helping Taeyong with the club finances for the first few months, making Doyoung sort of an honorary member, like Taeil, who'd lived through the constant drone of Yuta’s voice until this year. 

Asking Doyoung about this was probably a bad idea. It was probably worse than bad. "There are never 'right' and 'wrong' decisions," Doyoung used to say smartly. "Just bad, worse, and worst. You know, it’s not clear-cut, but instead, there are varying levels of bad. Someone’s going to lose no matter what decision you make. Which is why you suck it up and just try to cut the losses. That’s part of being a leader." 

Taeyong couldn’t look Yuta in the eye the next afternoon at practice— he’d skipped most of the day’s classes to avoid meeting Taeil, so no one was expecting him to be around. He hid in the bleachers under a dark hoodie and sunglasses, chin in his hand and watching his teammates but not quite watching, looking at the ground through routines they’d been practicing for months. He could just run away right then, but that would only make coming back even more difficult, and he owed it to them to at least say where he was going after ignoring Hansol and Ten’s numerous texts between last night and that afternoon. It was usually Yuta, but he’d been silent after what had happened the day before.

Taeyong had been mad. That was the initial reaction, which he stamped out immediately, because this was _Yuta_ , longtime friend and teammate, positive, silly, supportive Yuta. He couldn’t possibly have purposely chosen that day to make Taeyong’s evening a living hell. He’d probably just forgotten, you know, that they had a regional competition coming up that weekend, and that the last thing Taeyong needed was another thing on his mind. 

"I don’t really know how to say this," Yuta had begun, fingers clenching and unclenching at his sides. What had Taeyong been expecting? A question about cheer? Maybe Yuta lost his kneepads? Taeyong's heart started pounding as soon as he’d noticed that Yuta’s ears were turning red. It was almost unreachable, something that Taeyong couldn’t quite force out of his throat because he’d never considered it because Yuta was so damn in love with Moon Taeil; but in retrospect, how could Yuta, naive Yuta, have had the self-awareness to figure that out? 

In some ways, they were the same. It felt like choking on your own tongue, Taeyong standing there in front of the team, all stunned into silence that he’d missed most of practice and showed up at the end, physically fine and stiff as a countertop, bags under his eyes and no training gear to be found. 

"I like you," Yuta had said yesterday evening, then quickly followed it up with, "I mean— I mean, I think I have a crush on you."

Taeyong remembered laughing a little bit, and Yuta joined in, both shifting and squirming, trying to diffuse the situation.

"I know," said Yuta, looking down at his feet. "Stupid, right?"

"I— I don’t know what to say," Taeyong forced out. Yuta was still a little breathless from practice and looked like an angel in the fading sunlight. What would it have been like, dating Yuta? It didn’t seem gross or unacceptable, like how some people felt. He’d experienced a few after school confessions from mostly girls before, but they usually ran away before he had time to say anything and never approached him again. He’d also asked Doyoung what to do about this, and Doyoung just shrugged and grumbled something bitter about never having been confessed to before.

The first thing that came to mind was how irresponsible it would be to allow himself this. It might have worked in some parallel universe where a parallel Taeyong existed who wasn’t so goddamn selfish. The thing was, Taeyong reckoned he’d make a really bad boyfriend. He’d miss calls and texts or purposely ignore you so he could roll over and sleep for a few more hours. He’d blow you off for weeks at a time after finding a new video game to play or practicing for an important performance. He’d still _love_ you, but he wouldn’t know how to show it. ("I don’t think you’d be like that," Doyoung said once, but Doyoung talked a lot and his words held little power against the weight of carefully curated insecurity.) And the more Taeyong avoided you, the less he’d want to come back. 

It was a Problem that had been allowed to cultivate for some time now, but sometimes Taeyong would just freeze up and want to escape. Sometimes life was so overwhelming that nothing seemed like the right thing to do. Eating barely seemed manageable. Sleep was intermittent and full of nightmares. Taeyong would get to the gym or the studio or practice during those times, and work it off.

But what if it was _Yuta_ , what if the thing he wanted to escape from was right there in front of him, haunting all the places he considered home? The team would suffer; Yuta would suffer. The chances were low, but the risks were just way too high. And someone like Yuta deserved better. 

Taeyong's heart did a little flutter, which was more from the physical effect of flattery that anything else— Yuta was important to him, and it felt good to be loved. If only this moment could last forever, you know, the moment right before you break someone’s heart. 

"Well, I mean," continued Yuta. "You can think about it. You know. Like. You don’t have to say anything. You can just think about it or whatever, and we can keep doing the thing we’re doing, you know, being—"

"I can’t," Taeyong finally breathed out. 

Yuta didn’t look up. His fidgeting stopped for a moment, then continued. If you hadn’t known him for years, you wouldn’t have even noticed. 

Correction: there were a _million_ things Taeyong wanted to say, but they all would’ve made it worse. Things like, how could Yuta be so selfish and blind— hadn’t he considered Taeyong’s position? But at the same time how could he do that to himself, pining after someone like Taeyong for god knows how long, when someone (equally as dense, to be fair) had been there to love him this entire time? It felt like wanting to hug Yuta with one hand and punch him with the other. They must’ve cancelled each other out, because Taeyong ended up doing nothing. 

Yuta nodded and walked away from him, turning his back only after a few steps as if hoping Taeyong would cut him off and change his mind. And Taeyong had done nothing.

Hurting people was harder than being hurt. At least, if you never had a real desire to hurt anyone in the first place. That was part of why making decisions was so hard; that was what Doyoung had been trying to teach him this entire time. Someone was going to lose. Sometimes both of you lost. 

And now, here he was, the personal invitation to the National Youth Gymnastics, Tumbling, and Cheer Invitational folded into a small, wrinkled square in his hands, about to make one of two equally bad decisions, after a series of bad decisions had hit him like a cannonball launched from a ship in rapid succession, without break, from last night to that morning— from Yuta’s confession to being a stuttering mess in reply to even _considering_ the invitational when their team had regionals that weekend to not sleeping at all the previous night to skipping school and practice to showing up here, as the sun was about to set, and saying brashly, "Here’s the deal."

"You think you can greet us like that after missing practice _three days_ before regionals?" Ten piped up immediately. Taeyong visibly flinched, and Ten quirked his head with a hesitant smile growing on his face. "Just kidding," he said softly, "idiot."

Taeyong let out a nervous laugh which did nothing. "I— some of you know, if you’ve been here for a while, that I used to do ballet. And gymnastics. And cheer just sort of started as an offshoot of that. Like cross-training." 

"Boo," said Johnny. "Can’t believe we’re just your side chick."

"That’s…" started Taeyong, and he coughed when Ten elbowed Johnny in the ribs. "I mean, I’ve… I’ve since grown so attached to this team and all of you guys. Like, I don’t know where I’d be without you all. I’ve learned so much, and I— really, I’m so grateful to all of you for giving me a chance to be your captain, and helping me out when I needed it, and forgiving all of the times I messed up.

"And… I still practice dance, you know, but sometimes it’s a chore compared to here. When I’m with you guys, time flies by really quickly. Dance is— it’s really lonely. And sure, you get to be creative and do whatever the hell you want, but it’s not the same," said Taeyong. 

Everyone was silent by then and completely motionless. Even Yuta was looking up at him with a sort of twisted, complicated expression on his face. Yuta, who was usually so easy to read. 

Taeyong was just saying words now, opening his mouth and letting bullshit flow through unfiltered, and everyone else seemed to notice it too, but they let him continue, as if they wanted to see him stumble to his imminent self destruction. He more or less deserved it, anyway. "I— I know you guys… love me. I’m confident about that. You prove that every day when you trust me to catch your jumps, or listen to my advice, or whatever. Which is why," he continued, unfolding the sheet of paper hidden between his hand and his stomach, "which is why I brought this to you guys."

Hansol, whose face had been falling millimeters at a time while he watched Taeyong speak, suddenly said, "Just go."

That seemed to kick everyone out of their collective daze. Ten looked at Hansol curiously, clearly confused. Yuta’s face morphed into something dark and heavy and sad. Johnny’s expression was familiarly unreadable. Taeil, wide-eyed, seemed disoriented as well but was too frozen to ask about it. 

"It’s the invitational," Hansol offered. He had a way with keeping his voice calm, even when it was a strained kind of calm, like a rubber band pulled taut. "He’s been wanting to go for years." Hansol rubbed the back of his head sheepishly. "Dunno why you brought that here. You should go, really. We’ll be fine."

"Yeah," said Yuta, who hadn’t spoken for a while. His voice was hoarse. Everyone looked at him expecting him to continue, but Yuta looked down again and was clearly done talking.

Ten was a little harder to crack. Maybe he had different values, or maybe it was because he was new. He tilted his head and shot a blank gaze toward Taeyong, eyes piercing sharp. "But it’s this weekend? We have regionals?" he said, as if trying to send some sort of deeper telepathic message that Taeyong probably already knew.

Hansol shoved Ten playfully, but Ten seemed stiff in his shoes, swaying back into place quickly. "Hey, we did awesome at the invitational. He’ll just be missing some kickass partying after we take first at regionals," Hansol said, grinning toward Taeyong, and Johnny contributed an awkward laugh.

After a pause, Taeyong spoke again. "We’re— we’re gonna take a vote. Like we always do."

"Dude, just go," Johnny said. Taeil still glanced around, wide-eyed, and Yuta wouldn’t look up from the floor. "We’ll be fine. Promise. Hansol and I will hold the fort down here. We’ll even bring you back a trophy."

"It’s… it has to be unanimous," Taeyong continued, feeling smaller than ever. He stared at each of them for a while regardless of whether or not they were looking back. They needed him. All they had to do was say it. Which decision in the end was more selfish? "If even one of you votes for me to stay, I'll stay."

It was so tempting to close his eyes just as the others were doing, each with a slightly different expression on their face. But Taeyong had probably taken enough for that day. 

They were good friends. 

Taeyong had underestimated them.

— — —  
— — —

"You wanted him to stay, didn't you?" Yuta said, staring up at the evening sky poking through the leaves like little pinholes in paper.

"Mmm," hummed Taeil in affirmation. "We can't win without him." That was the unspoken issue that had scattered uneasily around the room that afternoon. Taeil should've brought it up. It was his responsibility, really, but as usual, he choked on his words and escaped into his mind, into a frozen state so deep within himself that it was getting harder and harder to swim back to the surface each time. Taeyong and Yuta were the only ones who could catch Taeil in the integral jump of their routine, and changing the jump would cost them a massive point deduction if only because the technicalities of their original jump made up a bulk of the routine's points. There were a hundred things Taeil could've said. He could've selfishly voted for Taeyong to stay, using the upcoming competition as an excuse for his own fickle indulgences. Instead, he selfishly voted for Taeyong to leave, knowing that he couldn't perform at full potential without Taeyong, costing the team the entire season. If anyone had the "right" to vote Taeyong to stay, it would've been Taeil. And yet he hadn’t. He’d frozen up again.

"Oh, come on," Yuta said, laughing. "Yeah, I'm bummed about the competition too, but winning's the last thing I'm concerned about."

"Liar," Taeil said immediately, without even looking at Yuta. Yuta always feigned indifference to cover up his emotions. It was a crutch he'd relied on since elementary school.

Yuta sighed. "Damn, you've gotten good," he said, and Taeil smiled a little weakly, still not looking at Yuta. "Dunno what's worse, being rejected by him and then him going around acting like nothing happened, or being so totally _thoroughly_ rejected that he leaves your life entirely."

"It's just a week," Taeil said. "It’s not like he’s leaving forever."

"But you feel it too, right?" said Yuta.

"Feel what?" replied Taeil, feeling something drop in his stomach at the vertigo from looking down from where they were sitting in the tree.

Yuta grumbled something unintelligible. "You know. Like it’s… never gonna be the same."

Taeil wasn’t afraid to fall. He’d been a flyer— jumping and falling, voluntarily, over and over— for months now. Of course he felt it. The aching thought that something big was on the horizon and that they were being pulled toward it by the strength of its sheer mass. Or maybe it was that time never waited— not for Taeil to figure out his feelings, not for Yuta to grieve an illusory loss— things just sort of happened, and as usual, they were swept up in the chaos. Maybe that was why they’d stuck by each other all these years. "That has nothing to do with it," said Taeil smartly. "Of course he’ll be gone during the competition, but you'll see him in school, and—"

"You liked him too," Yuta said suddenly. It wasn't a question, and there was nowhere for Taeil to run to— well, except for his mind palace, where he'd lie frozen for a couple of suspended seconds until his thoughts came together. But his poorly-timed hesitation made it all too easy for Yuta to press onward like he always did, more curious than accusatory. "I know, I saw the way you looked at him."

"He's handsome," admitted Taeil, which was a start. He stared at Yuta with wide, challenging eyes, but Yuta, unbothered, wouldn’t look away, and it left Taeil flustered. "Who wouldn't?"

Yuta didn’t reply right away, but he looked like he still had something to say, staring off into the distance and swinging his feet uneasily. It wasn’t like Yuta to think before he spoke; it was weird, foreboding, and too serious. It wasn’t like Yuta to be the serious one, the one who weighed the pros and cons of decisions before acting on them. He’d never made a serious decision in his life— he wasn’t one to commit to something that couldn’t be reversed. Yuta expertly avoided those sorts of things, so subtly you could barely notice. Yet here he was, debating between something as simple as a choice of words. Maybe that was why Taeil had been avoiding him for the past couple of weeks. This Yuta was alarming to him, and he wanted the old one back. "Okay, but you trust him but not anyone else on the team?" Yuta sounded confused and mildly distressed when he said this, as if he were trying to parse it for himself, too. "Your body has this weird gut reaction that won’t let anyone but me or him catch you? Explain that, then."

Taeil sighed and picked little pieces of bark off the tree. It was dark now, and flies gathered around the streetlights eagerly, looking for warmth. The singular direction of a fly’s life was so simple. "Taeyong is the team captain, it would be weird for me to not let him catch me."

Yuta met Taeil's eye then from around the trunk of the tree. "Okay, but— me and him? _Only_? I've known you since we were seven, and for Taeyong to come in here and just—"

"You make it sound like you're jealous of _him_ instead of me," Taeil retorted, uncharacteristically loud, like a child arguing about something petty with their older sibling.

Yuta gaped for a second like a fish out if water, and Taeil let out a cautious laugh, swinging his feet a little happier. It was always satisfying getting a rise out of Yuta even in the gloomiest of times. Leave it to Yuta to react to everything overdramatically, staring at Taeil cartoonishly while sputtering for words. "Don't be ridiculous," Yuta said after a long pause, but there wasn't much of his usual smile in his voice. 

When Taeil looked over, Yuta was staring forward into the space between their driveways, seeming in thought. Twice in one conversation? Maybe Taeyong leaving _had_ changed him in a funny sort of way. Maybe Taeyong leaving had matured him. 

"Okay," Yuta said out of the blue. Taeil glanced over at him, but Yuta was already darting down the tree, dropping two branches and letting himself fall the rest of the way.

"Careful," Taeil said, exasperated. "If both of you are out, I might as well just be a spotter."

"Please," Yuta said, grinning up at Taeil and easing him down from the tree. "You probably couldn’t even lift a cucumber." 

There was a time when Taeil stopped climbing the tree with Yuta— maybe it was when he was old enough to realize he could actually hurt himself falling from that height. For several years it was just Yuta using the sad old oak tree to slip in and out of Taeil's room at will, while Taeil used the door like normal people. That oak must’ve watched Yuta grow up and started leaning under his weight. Neither of them remembered exactly when Taeil had started climbing again, but it was some time that year, after he started cheer with Yuta. Yuta always descended first, then he’d catch Taeil— it was like cheer, and it was natural for them. 

This time they did it again, Yuta’s hands on Taeil’s feet, holding him suspended in the air like a swing. Usually Taeil had his back to Yuta, but today he was facing him, and suddenly they were chest to chest, Yuta’s hands around Taeil’s waist. Yuta was grinning down at him in that way he did, with the whole bookshelf teeth and all, glittering in the diffused light shining through the windows. "I’m sorry," Taeil said a little breathlessly.

"For what?" said Yuta, surprised.

Taeil looked down at a spot on Yuta’s sweater. "A lot of things."

"Hey," Yuta said, brushing Taeil’s bangs back from his forehead in a surprisingly tender gesture. "Me too."

"I mean, we haven’t been talking a lot recently," Taeil pointed out.

"That’s on me," Yuta said honestly. "I’ve been thinking a lot. I know, it’s weird. Dunno, I guess that just sort of happens when you’re approaching graduation, or some other major life milestone."

"I think I was avoiding you," Taeil continued. "And— and I’m sorry I told you to confess."

Yuta laughed and ruffled Taeil’s hair, and then the spell was broken. Not that there was any spell in the first place, but it felt like Yuta was stepping through glass and into the outside world while Taeil was left inside the aquarium then, when Yuta took a step back, stretching his arms up. "You couldn’t have known. I misjudged it. And it was bad timing." Yuta then took Taeil’s hand like he did when they were little and playing soccer in the driveway, or Yuta was playing soccer and Taeil was stumbling along. Those were simpler times. "Now come on, I want to show you this thing."

It wasn’t that Taeil liked giving up. It was that giving up required effort. Giving up meant letting go. It was that Newton’s first Law of Motion stated that objects at rest remained at rest and objects in motion remained in motion, and Taeil was being dragged along by some invisible force, like when how you walk for a long time, stopping and sitting down hurts more than just continuing to walk. 

It wasn’t that Taeil wanted to give up on Taeyong. He didn’t feel like continuing to pursue him either, though. Ending it just kinda felt right. Taeyong could be like a practice round. There were bigger and better things ahead, probably, now that Taeil knew where to look.

"Look, look," Yuta said, and Taeil huddled over his shoulder, staring down at Yuta’s phone. "It’s called a double full basket. It looks sick as hell. Feel like we could pull this off?"

Taeil sighed, smiling a little at Yuta’s excitability. He was always incredibly ambitious, especially when things weren’t going his way. He usually staved it off by trying even harder. That being said, the jump didn’t look _too_ out of their league. They’d worked on twisting in midair tosses before, thanks to Ten’s guidance. They had all the basic basket tosses down. "Not without practice," Taeil mumbled into Yuta’s shoulder, and Yuta grinned back at him.

"That means we have, like, 72 hours to get this right."

—

Training with Yuta was not _entirely_ different than training with Taeyong. The differences were subtle, like poetry or a good candle, but they were enough that Taeil began to notice them. Yuta was a whirlwind of singleminded ambition. Yuta was the definition of hellbent. It would be a miracle for Taeil to keep up, but they said miracles tended to happen under immense pressure. 

Yuta stalked into the gym the next day and started talking before Johnny or Hansol could even get a word in, but they looked pleasantly surprised by the sudden change in temperament. "Ten, you’re strong, right?" was the first thing Yuta said to a sulking Ten, who was nursing an ego damaged by his 0-3 loss to Hansol in jacks. 

"Yeah," said Ten, brightening instantly. "What of it?"

There would need to be three major prerequisites to landing the double full basket:  
1\. Ten would be a front spotter.  
2\. Yuta a back spotter, and   
3\. Johnny and Hansol, Taeil’s bases.  
The undercurrent of the entire setup was that Taeil could accept these qualifications, which was easier said than done. "You can’t build a relationship in two days," Johnny, who had never worked with Taeil hand-to-hand before but had definitely been there to witness the bloody Hansol catastrophe, pointed out.

"We can try," Yuta replied, and Taeil stole a glance up at Johnny, who was about three times his height and still as intimidating as a rabid grizzly bear. Taeil stiffened, and Yuta’s hands immediately came to his shoulders. He massaged the space between Taeil’s shoulders and neck, his thumbs pressing right into Taeil’s skin, and Taeil willed his muscles to fall after a quick sigh. Yuta didn’t let go. "Let’s get to work."

Johnny and Hansol were the size of those multi-story windows in hotel lobbies. This became apparent when they tossed Taeil, who couldn’t resist looking up to see just how much closer the ceiling looked from this vantage point. It was really close. Yuta had to reach up to pinch Johnny’s bicep when it felt too stiff or wasn’t quite in line with Hansol’s. They squatted down and let their legs take the most of the beating in their two days of rigorous training. 

Meanwhile, having Yuta behind Taeil felt like falling into the wind. Yuta wasn’t a wall of rigidity, nor was he large and imposing. He was a hurricane, a strange mixture of air and water that let Taeil float above him by mere laws of density. It felt _natural_ — rather than being caught in an embrace, it was like lying down on a bed of memories you weren’t sure were real or belonged to a far off dream. Taeil shivered every time Yuta’s hands touched his back— his stomach did a flip every time he landed because for a hot moment it felt like Yuta _wasn’t there at all_. And then he _was_ , cradling Taeil by the shoulders and breathing right into his face with a lopsided grin. 

The main problem was getting in enough rotations. There was a trampoline at an apartment complex near the local civic center; Taeil had practiced flips there once before, but sneaking in the front gates via a code passed down from a graduated member of the club seemed disingenuous. Of course, Taeyong had been there last time. He sort of exuded this "bad boy" aura that made it easier to do rebellious things (hence, the hair bleaching). It was just Yuta with Taeil this time in the cold evening, their breaths like defined puffs of watery white paint against the background of a darkening sky. 

"You’re doing really good," Yuta said, stuffing his hands in his pockets and jumping back and forth, trying to warm himself up.

A few months back, accepting Johnny and Hansol as bases seemed like a distant dream, but with Yuta behind him spotting, the bases' arms were like extensions under Yuta’s direction, like they were all one fluid piece, a blanket catching him before he hit the ground. There were roughly 14 hours before the competition, and the last 50 odd hours seemed to have flown by in a rush of excitement and intense concentration. And they still hadn’t even gotten to practicing the double full basket with the five of them together yet, though Taeil could more or less land his rotations on the trampoline, and they had about a 90% success rate with their other basket tosses. 

"You can, like, leave if you want," Taeil said awkwardly and slightly out of breath. They’d been at it for a few hours now, though Taeil gave Yuta some time on the trampoline in the middle because his body language was just _itching_ to jump on like a kid, and his eyes shone with childish desire. It was cute. "I just didn’t want to come in by myself."

"Nah, I’m staying," Yuta said easily, looking up at the sky.

"I mean, I’m probably gonna head out soon too," said Taeil, bouncing on his toes.

"I’ll walk you home."

Taeil made a face. "Are we crashing at my place tonight?"

Yuta laughed. "I need a good night’s sleep before the competition. So… probably no."

"Right," said Taeil, rubbing his arm uncomfortably. "I mean— you can have the bed if you want."

Yuta helped Taeil down from the trampoline, which honestly wasn’t necessary but if there was one thing Yuta was good at, it was being completely unnecessary in his every action. "Yeesh, your hands are cold," Yuta said, blowing on Taeil’s hands and rubbing them between his own, which weren’t actually faring much better. "Why do you want to be with me so bad tonight?" said Yuta, then burst out laughing a little awkwardly. "Ah— that sounded weird. You know what I mean."

Taeil smiled at little despite himself. "Dunno, just nervous. Remember, like, before tests and stuff, when you used to sleep over?"

"Yeah," Yuta breathed. He’d stopped rubbing Taeil’s hands but didn’t let go. "Yeah, I remember."

"And my mom said it was fine as long as we didn’t stay up late," Taeil continued. "I think I actually did better on those tests."

"I help calm your nerves," Yuta summarized, and Taeil nodded.

 _You’re good for me_ , Taeil was thinking but didn’t have the breath to say. Yuta probably knew already, anyway. Even if he did symbolize all the dangerous things Taeil would never have tried without Yuta egging him on, even if he always elbowed his way into Taeil’s life and shoved him unceremoniously out of his comfort zone. With Yuta, it was okay, even when it wasn’t.

They were planning to leave early the next morning, even before the sun rose. The venue was hours away. "We probably won’t talk much tomorrow," Yuta started, and Taeil looked up alarmed. Yuta grabbed at Taeil’s other hand, which was hanging limply by his side, and held them and looked around awkwardly, not meeting Taeil’s gaze. "So, um, can you promise me something?"

That was when Taeil’s heart started pounding thunderously in his chest. Not when he thought about the competition, not when there was a _situation_ looming in the distance— hundreds of people tomorrow, staring at him in athletic shorts and a tight polyester tee, flying through the air. Not when he thought about walking into a gym full of elite athletes and spectators and judges and they’d all be watching him. No, it was just Yuta being Yuta and doing the most unexpected things at the most unfortunate times. Taeil just then realized how far he’d come, really. "Yeah," said Taeil cautiously, and now they were both looking down. It was dark by then, though, so it wasn’t like there was anything to look at.

"Don’t do anything stupid," Yuta said finally. "We— we don’t have to come in first, you know. Taeyong isn’t here, and it’s not like it’s the end of the world. Just… take care of yourself. Don’t do anything stupid."

Taeil closed his eyes. The lineup was good this year. They were missing Taeyong, but Ten brought a whole new spark to the playing field that most other teams lacked, and Taeil wasn’t half bad himself. This would be th— _Yuta’s_ last year in high school cheer, and then they’d all go their separate ways, and they’d probably quit cheer to focus on their university studies or start work, and they’d maybe hit the gym a few times a week or go running instead or do other lonely adult things, and they’d spend the first New Year’s Eve together, partying and excitedly updating each other on their lives but not really understanding each other anymore after having fallen into new, different friend groups that bonded over drunken confessions and deeper discourse, and then it’d be less and less until they were reduced to sending each other mass-printed Christmas cards in their middle age with pictures of their families on them and maybe a dog or two.

Yuta’s hand was cold and heavy and solid around Taeil’s. Taeil squeezed Yuta’s fingers back until they overlapped each other. "Yuta, I need you to trust me," he whispered. He and Yuta talked a lot on the weekends into the wee morning hours, lights off and both of them staring up at the ceiling or maybe the backs of their own eyelids, struggling to stay awake. Hearing Yuta’s voice without actually seeing him was normal. But there was something about then, the two of them in the dark in an unfamiliar place, that made everything more intense. It was like a weird sensory deprivation experience, and all that was there were Yuta’s hands— warm palms, ice-cold fingers pushed together like a bundle of twigs, squeezed in Taeil’s hands. 

"I do," said Yuta carefully. "I do."

—

As predicted, they didn't talk the next morning. No one did. The sky was grey where it met the horizon and the grass was covered in a cold, dewy sort of frost, the kind that turned once orange leaves into a depressing shade of brown. Everyone seemed to know what to do; they filed onto the bus, too tired and solemn to be raucous, and missing the presence of a omnipotent Taeyong. Taeil chose a seat near the front as usual, and Yuta sat across from him, enough room on the bus for each of them to have their own seat, and Yuta had his earbud wires wrapped overtop his ears and draped over his shoulder, a beanie mashing his fringe into his face, skimming right overtop his eyes. 

It wasn't so much nerves that hit Taeil rather than the peace of acceptance. He wasn't as motion sick today as usual; it was like the calm before the storm. Even the gym felt oddly quiet, the lights buzzing in the background drowning out the other noises, the people talking, yelling, cheers, microphones, buzzers.

The unfamiliar school's locker room was unusually cold. It felt much colder than last night, when he and Yuta were literally standing outside in near-freezing temperatures, gasping as the wind rolled by. Taeil suppressed shivers as Yuta gathered the team for a last-minute pep-talk. "I know I'm not Taeyong—" he started.

"Boo," Johnny said, and everyone chuckled a little. "Get on with it."

Yuta shot Johnny a grin and continued with something both rehearsed and sincere. It warmed the room a little. "We've done all we can, and it's… more than I ever thought we could accomplish. It's been a rough few days, and just. Do your best out there, and be proud of yourselves. Does anyone else have anything to add?"

They hadn't told Johnny and Hansol and Ten about the full double basket. It had been a mutual decision on Yuta and Taeil's part— that was how they did things anyway, unspoken and understood. Sometimes words only made things even harder to understand, because people said things and meant different things. Yuta hated that, and Taeil didn't understand it, so they both discarded the system of verbal communication entirely. Which was why Taeil gingerly raised his hand then, saying, "Yeah, I want to— to add something." Yuta looked at him curiously but serious, motioning for him to continue. "Um, I first want to say thanks, for accepting me into your team."

"Boo!" Ten shouted, but he sounded so different than Johnny that it was comical and had a better effect.

Taeil stood up a little taller. "I… you guys have been amazing. At teaching me a bunch of things. But— but the most important thing was trust. And teamwork. They go together." Taeil breathed out, letting a wave of tension work through his body. It wasn't entirely gone, but it helped. "So… so I want you guys to trust me too. I know I've been difficult. I'm really sorry. But I need to know that you guys have… come to trust me too, I guess."

"Of course," said Hansol, the first to respond again. He offered a warm smile that Taeil returned.

Yuta nodded at the both of them, holding Taeil's gaze for slightly longer, a bit of concerned hesitance in his eyes, but then he broke away and nodded again firmly. "Okay, let's do this."

This competition didn’t seem to go by as quickly as the last one. The wait time was less, but when it was finally time for them to get on the mat, Taeil felt like he’d aged 20 years. Everything was heavy and silent, heavy with the _weight_ of silence. 

The jumps were fine. Ten was doing fine— spectacularly, actually. He was someone who tended to shine in the spotlight. No one had anything to worry about. They moved confidently and smoothly. If only Taeil could just carry the weight of this team for a little bit longer, stupid be damned. This was too important. _Yuta_ was too important. 

There was this visualization technique that Ten had taught him with really excited words and non-sequitur hand motions. Not, like, to visualized the trophy, he’d explained, but to visualize where you were going to be, to visualize how you were going to jump. To see yourself jumping and landing it, to visualize all the times you’d successfully landed it before. Sight was humans’ sharpest sense. So when he was steadying for the basket, stepping into their hands, Taeil visualized the trampoline in the dark of evening, Yuta right there beside him. For the first time ever since he’d started performing stunts with the team, Taeil closed his eyes.

And then, like that, the hands holding him up were gone, and there was only air.

Without vision, every movement of his body felt fine-tuned. Every twist and turn, every forced rotation, every beat of his heart. Even the gasping noise Yuta made when Taeil started flipping, even that was loud.

Yes, he was jumping. Yes, he would— he _could_ perform that toss if it killed him. And Yuta would be right there behind him. And Yuta was right there.

And Yuta was _right there_.

—

The first thing that was different was that Yuta was _there_.

There was a prolonged millisecond that felt slowed down, like moving toward a black hole, a warp in space, where that millisecond would never end. For that millisecond, it felt _right_ — Yuta being there to catch him. It felt like a dream where there was only the two of them and they were out in some flowery field on a sunny day, and Yuta was carrying him in his arms. 

And then someone called his name. It was Yuta, and the tone of voice wasn’t very befitting of a sunny day— it was echoey and distorted, warped like in huge building with horrible acoustics, like it was coming from all different directions but from nowhere at the same time. 

" _Taeil_!"

That was the dream, and this was now. This was reality. Taeil remembered all those times they’d practiced tosses, the five of them, in the school gymnasium, where he could never feel Yuta’s presence until it was almost too late. That was how it was supposed to go. So why was Yuta here, now?

Taeil’s eyes snapped open and his head twisted instinctively back to see Yuta’s shocked face go down with him. 

For a few moments, they were falling together. 

And then there were hands everywhere and a blunt, _hard_ pain in his head, a sharp, searing tear up through his arm and across his whole body, and the silence dispelled.

—

Taeil opened his eyes. He was definitely in a hospital, and his teammates definitely weren't there to laugh at his imminent demise. It looked like hospital: the walls were white, the ceiling tiles rectangular, the curtains this clean, sterile turquoise kind of color that was also a little nauseating at the same time. It sounded like hospital— hell, it even _smelled_ like hospital. Minty and alcoholic and powdery all at once. 

For what it was worth, the team had become a lot less intimidating over the short time they'd gotten to know each other, so it wasn't much of a surprise that no one was there when Taeil woke up, for better or worse. It looked like some time in the mid evening. The clouds cast deep, distorted shadows over the opposite wall, and Taeil's brain was sending mixed signals of both impeding doom and a vague kind of peace, possibly stemming from the assurance that all his limbs were still attached to his body. 

A small _sniff_ alerted him to the presence of a person in that guest chair, someone actually living in that haphazard pile of coats and duffel bags. 

It wasn’t Yuta. Yuta always got too hot when he slept. There were times when Taeil stayed over at Yuta’s place and woke up under a pile of Yuta’s blankets, doused with that heavy, rich scent, smelling a bit like meat and fruit and vanilla all in one. Yuta would never willingly swaddle himself like that. 

The pile shifted and a tired head poked out from the top, a familiar silver-white fringe and stark black roots staring up at Taeil. "Taeyong," Taeil croaked out, his voice hoarse from disuse. 

Taeyong smiled tiredly at him. "Hey," he said. 

Taeil blinked for a moment, trying to engage his brain in some sort of constructive thought process. Where had Taeyong been in all this, how much did he know, he wasn’t in the ambulance or— "Wait," Taeil said, suddenly sitting up straight. "Aren’t you supposed to be at— oh my god, how long have I been out?" 

Taeyong stood up slowly then, arranging the coats in a neat pile next to him. "Don’t worry," he said, laughing. "It’s only been a few hours." 

"What about the invitational?" said Taeil. 

Taeyong tensed for a moment before continuing to fold, not looking in Taeil’s direction. "Got kicked out," he replied. "I guess I wasn’t what they were looking for."

" _Liar_."

Taeil’s gaze shot up toward the door. There was Yuta, standing propped up against the frame. It wasn’t his usual pose of confidence and all things greasy and sluggish. He looked tired as hell, eyes swollen and baggy and red and his mouth drawn into a tense line. 

"Okay, you got me," said Taeyong, a sad little smile on his face as he stared down at his duffle bag but didn’t really seem to be looking at it. 

"Taeyong came right back when he heard what happened," Yuta continued, pushing off from the wall and taking slow steps toward the bed, where Taeil was sitting up now and surveying his own body to avoid looking at Yuta, who appeared oddly intense. Taeil found his wrist and ankle compressed in a sleeve and bandages, but nothing else seemed out of place. When Taeil looked up again, both of Yuta’s hands were tucked close to his body, and he was wearing the same jacket he had when they’d left for competition that morning. 

They stared at each other for a few moments. There was nothing familiar about Yuta’s expression. Taeil furrowed his eyebrows together in a vain effort to read it, but Yuta looked hard and serious and frazzled all at the same time, his eyes both desperate and wild in the way they watched Taeil’s every movement. He’d been crying.

"You didn’t trust me," Taeil said softly, looking away again.

"Yeah, I did," Yuta said sharply. After a pause, he snapped out, "I trusted you not to do anything stupid."

Taeil looked down and clenched halfheartedly at the blankets. 

"And you broke it," Yuta continued, louder this time, folding his arms in on himself even more. His tone was harsh, without a hint of his usual playfulness. Taeyong stood off to the side, quiet. "You could’ve _died_."

"You’re mad at me," Taeil stated plainly, slowly, trying to interpret Yuta’s reaction. He stared straight ahead all the while. His nails were short and his cuticles felt dry and his skin was weirdly white against the edges of the compression sleeve, which was scratchy and itched terribly.

"Yeah. I’m fucking pissed as hell."

Taeil’s hands came into fists this time, sheets bunched between his fingers. "Well, I’m mad at you, too."

"I don’t give a damn," Yuta grunted. "You can be mad at me forever for all I care." 

But Taeil was done with the conversation. There was nowhere for it to go but down. And Yuta would probably never come to understand. Taeil felt empty, hollow, as if he’d just been ripped off the machine and was waiting for his heart to slowly come to a stop. The one time he actually wanted to cry, the pinpricks behind his eyes weren’t even there— it was like he’d suddenly forgotten how to emote, forgotten all the things he’d learned in his last 17 years of living. The feeling was ironically familiar in a way, like a toxic old friend you see one day in the mall and walk the other way before they notice you’re there.

It was fear. It was like an empty house. A mind palace that was dark and had lost all power. It was how he felt when he was scared out of his wits or too anxious to function, except there was nowhere to run to because the place he’d gone all along was suddenly haunted, desolate, and looked strange and different, as if all the trees had gone bare in his absence, or the windows were punched out and the deck was rotted and he never noticed. As if there’d been someone there with him all along, all those times when he’d frozen up and run off into his mind, it was as if someone had been in there with him to comfort him and tell him stories and invite him to explore this strange new land, and that person had suddenly disappeared. It was as if that person were—

"Yuta," Taeyong mumbled quietly as Yuta slumped into one of the chairs next to Taeil’s bed. 

And that was what it felt like losing Yuta. It was like losing a piece of himself. And that was maybe what it had felt like for Yuta for a panicked few hours as they probably rushed Taeil to the emergency room. He’d been conscious for bits and pieces of it, or maybe most of it; everything had felt a little numb besides a throbbing pain in his wrist, blurry vision, and Yuta’s voice right next to his ear, _yelling_ , snapping at him not to go to sleep, "Don’t you dare pass out on me," frantic and close. 

—

He'd suffered a concussion, which was treated and stabilized first, along with a wrist ligament tear and a minor ankle sprain. "In laymen's terms," the doctor had said, squinting down at his charts, "you were extremely lucky." Taeil would need a few months of physical therapy to regain full range of motion in his wrist, with monthly x-rays to survey likeliness of needing surgery. "I don't think you'll be able to go back to cheer this season, if ever—"

"That's quite all right," Taeyong had cut in, and Taeil looked up at him resignedly. Taeyong sounded simultaneously stern and heartbreaking. Yuta didn't look like he'd budge on the issue either.

"That was a stupid thing you did," Taeyong said after the doctor had left. He pushed Taeil's hair back in a gentle gesture as the features on his face visibly softened. He looked tired, but he was smiling a little empathetically, the unspoken intimation being that he might've done the exact same thing were he in Taeil's position. Yuta didn't have to know or understand. "I ought to kick you off the team," he mused.

"Do it," Taeil said cheekily, and Taeyong laughed.

"Maybe when we get back."

There was a comfortable silence between them as they shared a moment, both trying to read each other without having to communicate verbally. With Taeyong, it was like information passed right through Taeil’s conscience and went straight to his heart— he didn’t understand what was being said, but there was _something_ , some sort of feeling in it, something that made him feel warm and loved. "Where are the others?" Taeil said after a while.

"I told them not to come," Taeyong replied, glancing over at the door. "Didn't want them thinking that they'd get all this attention for doing something like that." He looked back at Taeil and wrapped his hands around the bar at the side of the bed. "You, too, you know. Don't hurt yourself to prove you're worth something to all of us."

"I know," said Taeil. "I— I think I kinda wanted it too, though." It was selfish. Taeil _knew_ that. It was something that had to be accepted before he'd made the decision in the first place. That was why cheer was a team sport— if one person acted alone, regardless of how noble their intentions were, everything would get fucked up. The ability to weigh things like those was what made Taeyong such a good leader, and the trust and acceptance of responsibility he took for those decisions.

"I… also wanted to give you guys some time alone," Taeyong said, eyeing Yuta.

"Please don’t," Taeil said flatly.

Taeyong laughed. "You guys obviously have some stuff to sort out. Communication issues. You apparently don’t talk to each other very much."

"We talk all the time," Taeil protested, and Taeyong tsked like a sour mother.

"Not about the things that need to be talked about, then," he said, and Taeil sighed, giving up. "I’ll meet you back at the school, yeah?"

And with that it was just the two of them, Yuta looking at the door dejectedly as if willing Taeyong to come back saying they’d been Punk’d. He didn’t. 

Maybe if Taeil focused on the noises outside the room Yuta would get bored and just up and leave— nurses shuffling from room to room towing EKG machines and carts and metal rolling tables, casual, calming beeps, people calling out to each other in code, a system keeping the whole insitution running smoothly. The remaining daylight was fading fast, but the hospital truly never slept. 

Taeil’s brain was working a little better now. He’d tried parsing through the events leading up to the fall without much success, but this time, they seemed to kind of wedge themselves into order, like a makeshift building if you pushed enough stones together and called it a day. He flipped— Yuta clearly hadn’t been expecting it. Neither had Johnny, Hansol, or Ten, obviously, but they’d begrudgingly stayed in position. Maybe if Yuta had just stayed— but they could _maybe if_ all day, and nothing was going to change. Yuta had to have broken out of position to reach Taeil as early as he had, for Taeil to have felt his touch before he completed his rotations. The only reason Yuta would break formation is if his body had just acted on his own, as if in panic.

"I'm still mad at you," Taeil said softly, not looking at Yuta but instead out the window at a sky going from gray to a darker gray.

"Good," said Yuta.

"…What?"

Yuta sighed and unfolded his arms, leaning forward in his chair. "I said good." He, too, looked weary— a pathetic kind of tired as if he were embarrassed to be as winded as he was — when he finally stood up and looked down at Taeil. "At least you’re here to be mad."

"Yuta," Taeil murmured, his eyes welling up with tangible puddles of emotion. The stinging behind his eyes was back, the feeling like you wanted to sneeze. He kinda welcomed it. Taeil was getting a bit lonely, all on his own.

Yuta patiently watched him cry, and through the blurriness and the color of emotion, like a filter screen over his eyes, Yuta looked fond, almost charmed in a way. Yuta was never patient, and he loved "fixing" things for the instant gratification of being able to say that he fixed it. He’d always been quick to shake Taeil’s shoulder and wrap him up in a tight hug and make funny faces at him whenever he cried— anything to make it go away. It was sweet in its own way, like a kitten bringing you dead mice. But Yuta watched him now curiously, as if contemplating something he’d never seen the value in before, as if something he’d dismissed had been true the entire time. 

Taeil moved his hand gingerly to Yuta’s wrist, and Yuta tensed. There was something hard underneath his coat— it was a cast, not hard, but a compression sleeve type of thing, like Taeil’s own. "Yuta," Taeil repeated wistfully, stroking Yuta’s fingers that stuck out from under the cast. "How— how bad is it?"

Yuta sighed and rubbed the back of his head with his other hand. "Not too bad. Just a stress fracture, and some lower back issues cropping up again."

"I’m so sorry," Taeil whispered.

When he looked up, Yuta’s face was close, blocking the lights from the ceiling. It was shrouded in shadow, but he still looked bright as ever. It’d been a while since Taeil really looked at him like this, and Yuta had grown up, his facial features softening and coming together as he grew into them, sussing them out and trying them on for size. He was handsome up close; this had always been an undeniable truth. Yuta pressed his forehead against Taeil’s, their breaths mingling and stale and old as if they hadn’t spoken for ages. "Me too," Yuta said quiet and low, his eyes flicking downward for a short moment before looking right back up into Taeil’s eyes, and Taeil felt himself shudder.

—

The local hospital was a few subway stops from a bus that ran near their home. In all his seventeen years of living in the same place, Taeil had never known this. Rush hour had just passed and it wasn’t nearly late enough to head out on the town yet. The subway wasn’t crowded, the few passengers late-workers and stragglers and some couples out to casual weekend dinner dates. Taeil and Yuta rode together in silence, their knees fitting together like magnets. Yuta's body radiated an energetic kind of warmth that almost buzzed in its tireless peace. Taeil trailed behind Yuta when they got off the subway and wandered through the dimly lit station out into an empty suburban street, the bus stop the only lit structure for miles on all sides apart from the occasional car passing by.

When the bus rounded the nearby corner, Yuta held out his hand and Taeil took it instinctively. Yuta's fingers were cold but clammy, as if he were nervous about something. Taeil tried squeezing his fingers reassuringly. It was a little unusual for Yuta to be touchy like this without some blubbering excuse for an explanation, though Taeil was too tired to be more than mildly bothered by this. 

Yuta was otherwise silent on the bus and kept stealing glances at Taeil before looking quickly away, especially when Taeil met his gaze curiously. Taeil wrapped his arm around Yuta's, hoping to calm him down somewhat. Taeil was never good with words— physical affection was all he could offer. Now _he_ was the one looking for a quick fix, touching Yuta desperately to will his uncharacteristic anxiety away. Yuta accepted it wordlessly into his heart.

It wasn't until they stepped off the bus onto the corner of their street that Yuta took a deep, blaring breath and said, "You know, when I confessed to Taeyong, I wasn't— it wasn't some stuttering fairytale thing."

"Mm," Taeil responded, letting out a short breath of relief. It had only happened a few days ago, but somehow it felt like months had gone by and Yuta had only gotten to processing it now. Yuta's hand was still hooked in Taeil's comfortably. It was familiar when Yuta talked; they were used to it. It was a homey kind of white noise like birds and lawnmowers and the smell of grass in the summer. 

"It went exactly as we practiced it. Remember when we used to practice that?" Yuta said, swinging their arms together.

"Yeah," Taeil replied. "And you couldn't stop gushing long enough to take it seriously."

Yuta laughed, embarrassed. "There are a lot of good things about that guy."

"I'm not denying it," Taeil said. They used to practice what Yuta would say to Taeyong if he were ever to hypothetically confess. Yuta, after a few tries, would always get flustered and embarrassed, sometimes disproportionately so. Maybe he loved Taeyong that much, that simply imagining it would get him all in a tizzy. That must've been the case. Thinking back on it, Yuta had been earnest and tried his best during those silly simulations, and there was something endearing and handsome about it that always made Taeil's heart skip a beat, especially when Yuta looked right into his eyes like that. They were too close— if only it weren't _Yuta_ , but at the same time, the fact that it was Yuta made it even better. Taeil could never grow to trust anyone else so completely.

"Taeil, I—" Yuta started, then he went stiff and stopped walking, though they were nowhere near their homes. Taeil looked back at him patiently— somehow, he didn’t want the evening to end, either. "I have no idea if I know what love is."

"That's okay," Taeil said easily. "Neither do I."

Yuta's expression flickered into a smile for a moment, then he looked troubled again. "But I— when I thought— when I thought I might lose you..."

"Oh come on, we're over that," Taeil said with a breathy laugh. It was dark again, but they were almost home, standing on a street they’d walked thousands of times. Now that cheer was over, would it be possible to go back to how they were before? Although it would be a little sad in a way, having experienced something short and blissful and rushed all at once, like a vacation, and then having to go back to the daily grind. "I'm here, I'm fine. You can't get rid of me that easily."

"I don't want to— ever," Yuta breathed. His stare was so intense he was almost glaring, though you could tell he was trying to parse something over in his brain. "Wow, I mean," Yuta continued lamely. "I never thought I'd be the one at a loss for words."

"You don't have to say anything," said Taeil, squeezing Yuta's hand again. "We're chill, we—"

"No, I want to, I— I don’t want to be chill," said Yuta, and Taeil had to laugh at how ridiculous it all was, how they were standing in front of some random neighbor’s house past sunset in near-freezing weather, Yuta trying so desperately to vocalize something so important, yet all he could get out was _not wanting to be chill_. Seeing Taeil smile, Yuta grinned, muttering, "So this is what it feels like."

"What… what feels like?" Taeil said. Their breaths were starting to take shape under the light of the nearby lamppost, floating up like what wind would look like if it came packaged in little pouches.

Yuta lifted his other hand, bundled in a black sleeve cast that was hard and heavy when he wrapped his fingers around Taeil's hand. He was shaking, but his voice was firm when he said, "I think I'm in love with you."

The shiver ran up to Taeil's face before he had time to react.

It went all the way up through his cheeks and his ears in what was definitely blooming into a deep pink blush. He wasn’t much of a blusher, and Yuta’s eyes seemed to twinkle in response. Yuta liked having that effect on people. "I— _Yuta_..." Taeil breathed. His heart was only catching up with him now, like adrenaline a little late to the party, starting to hammer in his chest so hard it almost hurt in order to make up for lost time. "Yuta, are you— are you _sure_?"

Yuta laughed fully, happily, as if unconcerned about the outcome of this conversation. "No, I'm not _entirely_ sure. I mean, I'm— I'm like, pretty sure?"

Taeil felt warm. Like a warmth from deep inside, spreading through his every nerve ending and into the tips of his fingers, where Yuta, both eager and calm, was holding him. A warm peace, like he’d already accepted that no matter what Taeil said in reply, it would be okay. "You know I— I don’t think I’ll be good at loving you back," Taeil said, looking down at their hands.

This time, Yuta squeezed Taeil’s hand. "That’s okay," he said, gentle and welcoming and safe, and Taeil was distinctly aware of his own heartbeat again, pulsing as if pumping the warmth through his body. "Just… let me love you?"

And then Taeil stepped forward and wrapped his arms around Yuta’s neck, pulling himself up into a hug. Yuta’s arms fit around his waist too well, and they molded against each other, hanging on for dear life. Taeil blinked his eyes shut and nuzzled into Yuta’s neck, and Yuta smelled like home, like chocolate and rice cakes and pork, like 2-in-1 shampoo and conditioner, like that spearmint gum he always chewed when he was nervous. And Yuta’s skin was soft, like the little hairs right at his nape, and his ears were hot and flushed and red at the tips. 

Taeil only pulled back when Yuta touched his face, drawing a gentle line down his jaw. "Can I kiss you?" Yuta said softly, and Taeil felt his own breath catch in his throat. 

He nodded in response because there seemed to be nothing else to say. And then Yuta was nibbling on Taeil’s upper lip, his lips cold and soft and chapped in places, but gentle in the way he claimed possession to Taeil. And Taeil tried to follow along, to kiss back and breathe through his nose and it felt like Yuta was all around him, eclipsing his entire world. And it was perfectly fine. In fact, it was better than fine— it was nice, because Yuta was familiar, and Yuta _loved_ him, and Yuta blocked out everything that was overwhelming and unpleasant. They broke apart for an instant after what seemed like just a prolonged touch of lips, and Taeil, ahead of himself, whispered, "Again."

Yuta kissed him harder this time, hands sliding down the sides of Taeil’s face and mapping out his shoulders and body, all the way down to his hips, where they rested and tightened and claimed. Taeil gasped at Yuta’s thumb brushing past the little space between his jacket and his jeans, the cold patch of exposed skin that had been bothering him the whole day where his shirt was too short. It made it feel like Yuta’s fingers were on fire, coming back and lingering there, Yuta drinking in the little noises Taeil made from the back of his throat. He traced Taeil’s lips with his tongue when Taeil’s mouth fell open, but he seemed hesitant, stopping there and just breathing in Taeil’s air, asking for permission.

Taeil hummed desperately and buried his fingers in Yuta’s shoulders while his other hand went to tangle in Yuta’s hair. And Yuta, catching his breath, kissed Taeil _again_ , coaxing Taeil's lips open for him with his tongue. Taeil moaned outright when their tongues caught each other, and Yuta responded in kind, rubbing circles into Taeil’s skin.

They’d known each other for so long, but not like this— not the inside of each other’s mouths and the backs of their teeth, not the way they breathed and panted against each other, not the way Taeil arched into Yuta when Yuta went to move his hands around to the small of Taeil’s back. If this was love, it felt like sharing a part of yourself with someone else so that you didn’t have to carry alone all the great burden of existence. He wanted to give Yuta more. Taeil felt light in Yuta’s arms, as if they were in space, as if they’d floated to an altitude of less gravity. It was like Yuta was helping him stand by pulling him away from the earth, and Taeil wanted desperately to follow.

Their kisses were slow and sensual, interrupted by quick gasps for breaths because neither wanted to stop. "We should—" Yuta started, but Taeil kept blindly pressing into his lips, and Yuta responded through light, breathless laughs. "We should—" a kiss, "—get—" another peck, "— _home_ ," he finished, finally going for Taeil’s temple instead with a soft kiss while Taeil buried his face in Yuta’s shoulder.

"Yeah," Taeil mumbled after a while. 

Yuta made a pleased noise and giggled into Taeil’s hair. "You liked that?"

"…Yes," mumbled Taeil again, flushing. 

"Good," said Yuta, who was happy to make other people happy. "I liked it too. I really liked it."

Taeil latched on to Yuta’s arm and huddled close to his side as they stumbled toward their houses like in a three-legged race, trying to share as much contact as possible. 

— 

Taeil slid into the gymnasium early Monday afternoon, just in time to witness Taeyong gathering the younger members for a quick team meeting. "Taeil won’t be joining us this afternoon," he said seriously, and Taeil grinned into his own arm, easing his way across the bleachers. "Or… ever," Taeyong continued, rubbing the back of his head. "Because I… kicked him… off?"

Yuta snorted as he sat down next to Taeil and grabbed his hand. "He’s useless at this."

"He’s too soft," Taeil agreed, humming.

"And Yuta’s out for the season with injury," Taeyong said quickly. "Okay, that’s all. Everyone line up for stretches."

Taeil and Yuta tried with varying degrees of success to be subtle, but Ten caught on right away. Yuta seemed cautious, hesitant to take it too quickly, but the physical affection was addicting and the more Yuta gave him, the more Taeil wanted. "There’s something different about the way you guys interact today," Ten said when Yuta asked indignantly how he’d known. "Like… you’re familiar but new at the same time."

He wasn’t wrong. There was an awkwardness that hadn’t been there before as they felt each other out and tested the waters. But there was something about how Yuta touched him, firm and purposeful but not aggressive in any way, like he _wanted_ Taeil but made sure Taeil wanted it too before making any advances. That way when he did act, it was a sure movement, a motion without an ounce of hesitance. They had spent what remained of yesterday (after sleeping in past noon) home alone in Taeil’s room, half shy and embarrassed and half drunk on each other. Yuta loved rolling on top of Taeil and gazing up at him with his elbows on either side of him and his chin hovering over Taeil’s sternum. He would look at Taeil and study him with an expression so warm and full of wonder that Taeil would have to look away first and cover his face with his hands. And then Yuta pulled Taeil’s hands away and kissed him soft and full, climbing up Taeil’s body and lacing their fingers together and pushing Taeil’s hands back against the bed, right up next to his ears. Yuta spent a long time touching Taeil’s ears and neck and shoulders and waist and hips, too, testing out all the spots on his body that would make him shiver and close his eyes and curl in on himself, only to have Yuta gently peel him apart again, wrap his arms around to Taeil’s back, and hold him close, chest to chest, and kiss him again, open mouthed and breathy but still slow, almost teasing in a way even though they both opened up for each other wholly. 

But Yuta seemed to have a clear idea of how far he wanted them to go then, which was good, because Taeil didn’t. "We’ll do that later," he said, brushing Taeil’s hair back. "We have a lot of time." He then held up his arm, stiff in a soft cast, and bumped into Taeil’s twin arm. "And we’re kind of impaired right now."

"Yeah," Taeil said, which seemed to be the only thing he had strength to say for the past few days. But that was okay, you know, because Yuta could speak for him.

"I’m really mostly kicking you off because you stood me up the other day," Taeyong said, puffing his cheeks out in annoyance. "I deadass stood outside our school for three hours waiting for you two to show up, and then you go careening off into the sunset without even bothering to text or notify me."

Before Taeil had time to feel bad, Yuta said flatly, "Did Doyoung tell you to say that?"

"… Maybe," Taeyong replied. Taeil laughed honestly, knowing that Taeyong had his moments, too. "I think you guys… rather than not trusting each other, maybe trusted each other too much?" Taeyong mused one day while sweeping up the gymnasium floor after practice. Taeil and Yuta helped him with this, and Doyoung too sometimes, conveniently forgetting about his student council activities. "Love truly is blind," he sang, and Doyoung kicked him in the backs of the knees.

Maybe some day they’d come to understand what Taeyong meant by this. For now, they were just grateful for his blessing. Maybe some day their wisdom would catch up with their years. For now, they were just grateful they had each other.

**Author's Note:**

> My first non-pwp fic. What is this.
> 
> ... To give you an idea of how long I've been working on this, I've....... been working since Taeyong still had platinum hair. This all came literally from Yuta telling Taeil to do cheerleading in NCT Life in Paju and Yuta being super enamored with it and it turned into a 30k fic im _(:3｣∠)_ I didn't mean for it to be this long but I underestimated how difficult building a childhood friend relationship was and trying to balance out all the scenes so that some unimportant scene didn't end up dominating the entire story. This is probably the most emotional thing I've written, but none of it is personal. Going off of that, I have a couple disclaimers:
> 
> \- I don't know anything about cheerleading. I did a little research online but I think I conflated it with my knowledge of figure skating somewhat. I know some aspects might be unrealistic (like being able to learn all this in a few months, etc.), and I apologize about that. I hope it didn't detract from the fic too much. I tried not to make it the main point of the story.
> 
> \- The setting of this is some unspecified suburb/city in some unspecified country. I mentioned driving, walking, and subway all as means of transportation, and the school grades/specifics are a little wonky (with the whole 3A, 3B thing vs school starting in the autumn). Sorry about this too!
> 
> \- Parents and siblings are almost all absent from the story. I know in high school it's a little unrealistic not to have parents involved (especially in the hospital scene), but this was all mainly because I feel uncomfortable writing about idols' families. Again, I hope it didn't detract too much from the story.
> 
> \- Title is from the Mika album with the same name
> 
> \- I imagine a happy ending for Taeyong... maybe Dotae (:
> 
> I almost gave up and trashed this so many times, so thank you so much to all the friends who cheered me on! You guys know who you are :3 Anyway, thank you all for reading! Thanks mostly for getting all the way through it. I'm never writing longfic again lol. *waves a little Yuil flag* (Actually I love Yutae and 2tae too so I felt bad writing this whole thing, but Yuil needs more love!)


End file.
